Heartland – Contemporary Art from South Australia | Art Gallery of South Australia | 21 June – 8 September 2013Sculpture has traditionally valued weight, stasis and permanence, but Adelaide based artist Amy Joy Watson has developed her signature sculptural practice using two of the lightest materials available – helium and balsa wood. For HEARTLAND Watson has created a legion of floating forms comprised of hand-coloured and hand-stitched balsa wood polyhedrons, suspended by large helium filled balloons. The resulting forms are enigmatic and unstable, responding to changes in the Gallery’s climate and to the movement of the audience. The forms themselves, diligently crafted in one of the world’s lightest timbers, are ambiguous and unknowable. They are reminiscent of the cryptic polyhedron found in the famed early sixteenth century engraving by Albrecht Dürer titled Melencolia I (a print of which is held in the Art Gallery of South Australia’s collection). Watson’s sculptural equilibrium between two elemental forces – between air and earth – is founded on a desire to inhabit and transform a location. Their uncanny form and tentative buoyancy reflects our fragile and curious relationship to place. Excerpt from Heartland Catalogue Essay by Nici Cumpston and Lisa Slade Floating Sequence, 2012, balsa wood, watercolour, gouache, polyester thread, lead weights, balloons, helium, dimensions variable Floating Sequence, 2012, detail Floating Sequence, 2012, detail Floating Sequence, 2012, detail
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