GRACIA + LOUISE

ACT XII: NEW WORKS ON PAPER
Twelve acts in time: staging art on paper

Raymond Arnold, Jon Campbell, Gunter Christman, Jazmina Cininas, Lesley Duxbury, Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, Mitch Lang, Noel McKenna, Deborah Paauwe, George Popperwell, Bernhard Sachs, Hossein Valamanesh

George Adams Gallery, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne
UTS gallery, University of Technology, Sydney
Artspace, Adelaide Festival Centre, Adelaide

Since its birth over 2000 years ago, paper has been both currency and disseminator of culture and ideas. Its relevance has long since reached global proportions. Who of us in the Western world, despite the advances of technology and aspirations for a 'paperless office', does not encounter paper everyday? Paper transmits information, conveys ideas, and is the most democratic of supports. But above all, paper has a memory. It bears human marks and meanings almost sacrificially.

The works in Act XII are linked by two things: they are made on or with paper, and they coalesce in a performative thematic context, which broadly considers notions of staging in art and the artistic enactment of ideas. The act of making art - the creating process - is intrinsic to the finished product. So, in addition to the message, story, symbolism, subject or motif, and the artist's own predilections and history, an artwork is as bound by the act of its creation as it can be by the period and milieu of its creation. The gestural act is a moment which sums up an accumulation of moments (as a part of history and its place in the artist's life) and is a function of time.

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Using diaries of a different kind, Gracia Haby and Louise Jennison have made an art of their everyday. In Melbourne in 31 days and 30 days in Vienna, the most recent of eight collaborative artists' books, they couple detailed diarised text - more stream of consciousness than interpretation - that chronicles the pair's activities over a predetermined period, with the collected haberdash of life. Together with scanned images, hand-drawn pictures, notation and intricate embellishment, the books make for insightful and delightful reading. Part of a journey, the book made in Melbourne became a performance piece at the Weinstation in Vienna in March 2002. The performance was a turning point, metaphorically blurring the experience of the months. The experience of the Vienna trip was compiled for another book on the artists' return; the gestural act in real time.

The openness and delicacy of these works can also be seen in Haby and Jennison's pale, luminous prints of fantasy lands. Their The plight of the birds and The tears of the elephant are two optimistic tales, depicting a search for happiness in which narrative time is mapped by the fine longitudinal lines that pattern the print surface. In recounting real stories and creating imagined tales, Haby and Jennison engage the motions of staging - shifts in time, scale and space - to make art out of art's own enactment.

An extract from Twelve acts in time: staging art on paper, Act XII catalogue
Lesley Harding, Curator

{Image below, page detail from By the Pricking of My Claws.}