Artists

ROSEMARY O’ROURKE

RON SPIERS

CHRISTL BERG

Date: 07-Feb-2004 – 29-Feb-2004

Location: Contemporary Art Tasmania

3 into 1 is an annual exhibition format in which three early career artists present independent solo exhibitions of new work simultaneously in CAST Gallery.

ROSEMARY O’ROURKE – OBJECTS OF VERTU
In Objects of Vertu Rosemary O’Rourke channels the joyful instincts and innate mysticism that she possessed as a young girl. The ethereal, decorative forms draw on the traditional, Catholic devotional trappings; objects worn, handled or swallowed and imbued with bodily presence; relics; icons animated by ritual and invested with supernatural power. Rosary beads; the consecrated communion wafer; scapulars of brown felt worn next to the skin; medallions of the saints; phials of holy water; the blue cloak of Mary, the lily of the annunciation – many of these tropes had their roots in medieval Christianity. Having reached their aesthetic zenith in the renaissance, now they are to be found in the tawdry articles of faith (debased, but sometimes curious nonetheless) sold in Catholic bookshops and souvenir stalls – including the Vatican giftshop.

Rosemary O’Rourke has reappropriated and re-fashioned the forms of Christian kitsch. Her tenderly crafted, soft sculptural objects give abstracted expression to the lived bodily experience and sensuality of nascent femininity: jouissance. In many respects, there is great humility in these apparently frail, diaphanous structures. However, rekindled out of the sharp sensations of childhood, with their handcrafted delicacy and finesse, these Objects of Vertu are genuine objects of wonder.

– Catalogue extract, Maria Kunda © 2002

RON SPIERS – SHADOW BOXING
This exhibition contains low relief wall based sculptures that have been produced over a seven-year period. My art practice draws heavily on the relationship between the Fibonacci Series and the Golden Mean. What interests me about this relationship is that the two independent systems, one numerical and the other geometric, result in the same proportional relationship when expressed as a ratio, with the mathematical name of Phi ø. Significantly, Phi like pi ? is an open irrational number without a conclusion; so I can keep working within the square without having to think outside it. Metaphorically, there is something exquisitely elegant in the way numbers express such a simple relationship, tiptoeing between a myriad of options, using all the available numerals and forever avoiding the one, at that point in the series that would cause completion.

– Ron Spiers © 2004

CHRISTL BERG – FINDS
finds constitutes one component of my wider investigation into a photographic interpretation of the experience of being in the land. finds comprises a collection of 180 digital images, traces of as many objects found on the ground of Maria Island. The traces are of remnants of flora and fauna. These fragments from the land suggest the larger whole and the wider natural and cultural history of Maria Island. They are the ciphers for my language of interpretation, forming a personalised taxonomy of the island.

The images are grouped following a passage from the foreshore over land and back to the foreshore. They are not ordered in a scientific system but according to an intuitive mode of collecting and assembling. I refer to a form of classification that is based, unlike the analytical Linnaean system, on a semantic network in which each being or thing is experienced as connected to the world.

Christl Berg © 2003