unnamed

priscilla beck

21 August – 7 September 2019

Beautiful things that will not have a lasting impact

on the room

Llewellyn Millhouse

Most artists have spent a good bit of time filling holes and gaps in a white wall. This is particularly true of artists like Priscilla who have worked in ARIs and art institutions, doing install work or what you might call “behind the scenes” labour.

Priscilla’s work Unnamed undermines the functional purpose of this labour by making it highly visible. Pressing the art object into the inevitable wounds of the white cube, Priscilla draws attention to what the gallery usually tries to hide. This gesture asks its audience why the conventions of artwork display prioritise whiteness, attempts at neutrality, and the erasure of the gallery’s own physical history. If the gallery is considered as a subject or a body, Unnamed acts as a reclamation and aestheticisation of the abject.

Priscilla has used porcelain to fill in the holes and gaps of a gallery in a previous installation, time passes and nothing happens 2016 (Plimsoll Gallery, Hobart). Here porcelain-as-putty accompanies other small porcelain finger gestures, littered on the floor of the gallery like piles of leaves. In this work Priscilla’s porcelain impressions retain some of the status of a conventional art object. Rather than receding into the structural framework, they appear to be seeping out of the cracks and windows of the gallery, carrying the fragility, temporality and preciousness of biological forms left uprooted.

Despite its material difference, Priscilla’s project On days like these... 2017 (Hobiennale / Contemporary Art Tasmania, Hobart) acts as a link between Unnamed and time passes and nothing happens. Re-performed for the 2018 Churchie National Emerging Art Prize, On days like these... involves Priscilla colouring-in the entire surface of a gallery wall with short charcoal lines. This process is immediately recognisable as very labour-intensive. In its scale and simplicity, On days like these... shifts the focus of the work away from object and intention towards laborious commitment and the inevitability of erasure. While the surface of On days like these... is strikingly beautiful, the work demonstrates a bleak struggle against both art objecthood and the cyclical temporality of institutional exhibitions.

Priscilla and I met on my first day at art school in 2008. Priscilla had started studying six months earlier, so she was able to help me with a lot of things. Since then we have seen each other make and display many different artworks. Looking back at what I remember of our shared history, Priscilla’s practice reminds me of a small box I had as a kid. I think a lot of kids have these “special boxes”, where you can put special rocks, or stickers, or toys, or notes. Objects that you find or are given to you that take on a kind of magic or poetic significance.

Similar to the practice of diary keeping, having a special box helps people to cultivate a headquarters of the self. Little objects are injected with significance, representing strong feelings or understandings of the self and the self’s intimate relationships. Having a box like this encouraged me to seek out and maintain these kinds of relationships with objects. I am sure that without the box I would still have found some of the same special objects, but having a box meant that I knew what to do with them.

Without a home for these objects their power tends to diminish over time. In contrast, putting your special object in the box delineates it from the everyday, carving out a small magical world for the object that acts to magnify its power and significance over time. Objects in the box grow relationships and dependencies on one another, coming to represent a passage of time, connections to place and personal histories.

The objects that Priscilla would inject with emotional significance were often small photographs, drawings, handwritten poetry on paper, or found objects like bits of fluff from her lover’s belly button. Reflecting on my memory of works from this period, Priscilla’s recent projects become heavy with a sense of self-portraiture. Making art allows Priscilla to live a life full of objects that carry emotional significance and intimate history. As a result, Priscilla’s art practice more accurately reflects her life and way of being in the world than many other artists. In this way, Unnamed is an unusual form of institutional critique because it strives against the conventions of the gallery to find a place for poetry, self-understanding and intimacy.

Filling in the cracksPriscilla Beck

Artists spend so much time thinking about the ‘stuff’ of life, making connections between material and meaning. Those thoughts about the world that make up who we are, are always finding ways to come through in the way artists manipulate materials.

I think about the meaning in my life and the value of the small worlds I have carved out for myself. Often these things make the most sense when I try to articulate them as a small and inconsequential thing, interacting with another small thing. All of the sadness in the world can be told in the cracks in the ceiling rose above my bed; mistakes of the past in the way sandstone blocks slowly crumble to dust; love in the way one person tidies up after another. Maybe it is that artists think through matter, rather than words. What we’re doing is often difficult to name.

A lot of time in art spaces is also spent patching and painting white walls, rigging lights, tidying cables or sweeping up dust. So much time spent with these processes can render them endearing, or familiar, like muscle memory, or an old friend. As though each was a little ritual that marks the beginning, or the conclusion of an idea. I have notebooks filled with little odes to process, ideas about art spaces and the way time and people pass through them.

dust and light:

time passes and nothing happens.

if the artwork wasn’t there, people might notice how the light catches the dust as a perfect illustration of time

passing and nothing happening

but as the artwork created both the dust, and the light within which it is caught, perhaps it is necessary after all.

I think a lot of artists, and people who spend time in art spaces have the same kinds of thoughts.

Sometimes, through the action of doing something small, there comes a glimmer of understanding; some-thing like repairing the holes left behind in gallery walls, using, instead of the sturdy compound of purpose-made filler, impractical and fragile porcelain clay - beautiful things that will not have a lasting impact on the room. Neither fixed, nor broken, there is a kind of logic in it.

There is also a kind of challenge to the systems of art, which can be extended to encompass the systems of the world.

Porcelain clay is temperamental and delicate - slick and somehow bodily.

I think about growing up in Brisbane and wading through mangroves, ankle deep in thick, silky mud that hides the savage mangrove seed pods and dries to a pale pink crust on my legs. It takes an amount of skill to turn porcelain into the fine, translucent objects that it is known for, and some amount of cheek to turn it into the structural integrity of a room.

The mud on my legs, fine porcelain clay, and spackle filler, sandpaper and paint are all the same in this room; I can swap one out for another at will.

Although the repairs are made with porcelain clay, I am neither ceramicist nor builder. I am only pushing stuff into cracks with my fingers, smoothing surfaces with my palm, scraping clean edges with my fingernail. Pushing matter around. Feeling the room. I am one small incon-sequential thing, interacting with another small thing, in relation to a small room (one small room among many rooms).

One of art’s values is that it can change the behaviour of the viewer for a moment, often slowing people down and heightening perception in order for people to see and respond to the artwork. There is a kind of game in this work, which takes the ‘art object’ out of the equation and gives the power of perception back to the person in the room. They might notice, or not notice, that there is anything there at all.

Due to the nature of the material, it is only ever going to be a temporary fix, as over the course of the exhibition the clay will shrink and crack, falling out of nail holes, cracks in the paint and the gaps between walls and window sills. What begins as an installation so subtle as to require attention and patience to enjoy, self sabotages over time as it dries and breaks away.

All there is may be in this room, but there is also nothing here, nothing at all.

The artist and Metro Arts acknowledge the traditional custodians of Brisbane, the Turrbal and Jagera people. The artist acknowl-edges the palawa peoples of lutruwita/Tasmania, the custodians of the lands in which she lives and works. The artist and Metro arts give their respect to elders past, present and emerging and know that sovereignty has never been ceded.

Metro Arts is supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. Metro Arts is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, part of the Department of Environment and Sci-ence. Metro Arts is proudly supported by Brisbane City Council. Metro Arts is proudly supported by TAFE Queensland as Educa-tion Partner. Metro Arts is proud partner of Bones Accounting, Dendy Cinemas, EPSON and The Victory Hotel.