A lilac beaded necklace. It doesn't look particularly striking; it's actually almost banal. But you can imagine the person who used to own it wearing it as a simple every day accessory, or maybe on a special occasion, like a dinner out with friends or on a date.
Yet, we all know that once the allure, the glamour and the appeal of an object have gone, we tend to throw it out. So, we can easily imagine the owner of this simple object getting rid of it and the necklace ending up in a landfill or maybe in a thrift shop. The story of that necklace, though, becomes irrelevant as by now the piece has a new life as a part of an artwork by Erika Scott.
The Australian artist mainly working with sculpture and installations creates indeed assemblages using discarded objects, bits and pieces from our culture of endless consumption, from the debris of our modern times.
Scott collects and reconfigures these salvaged domestic detritus into architectural structures and multi-sensory landscapes. Modifying their intended use and value, the artist explores systems of exchange in our society, but also our personal habits of accumulating and hoarding, buying and forgetting.
Through her cluttered artworks Scott tackles our collective mania for amassing, collecting, displaying, showcasing, and then throwing out as well.
The artist doesn't change the configurations of the objects she employs: she isn't indeed using these pieces to tell us how to recycle or upcycle them and transform the undesirable into the desirable. The objects in her sculptures remain the same so, when you examine sections of her works, you can spot a toy here or a latex horror-themed mask there, hoses and kitsch statuettes, a a wide selection of waste materials entangled together in an uncanny embrace.
Her latest work, "The Circadian Cul-de-sac" (2023), is currently on at The National 4, the latest iteration of the multi-venue biennial survey of Australian art. The event features experimental works by over 80 artists on display across four of Sydney's cultural institutions. "The National 4: Australian Art Now" at Carriageworks (until 25th June 2023) brings together 11 new artist commissions, some of them employing found materials as a social and political commentary.
Part of this display, Scott’s "The Circadian Cul-de-sac" consists in ordinary objects wrapped around a four-metre-high hourglass sculpture made of two zorb balls, set in an inflated bubbling pool.
The structure incorporates discarded fish tanks, car tires, empty photo frames, LED lights, jewelry, TV remotes, plastic grapes, an eye mask, screens and computer keyboard keys, Tampax instructions, and all sorts of tchotchkes. Objects are combined in humorous ways or uncanny ways (a statuette of a seahorse is attached to a pipe as if it were sucking oxygen from it or as if it were being poisoned by toxic discharges...).
At times the artist plays with colour or material juxtapositions to explore visual sensations and tactile dimensions, but all objects here, once collected and beloved, have lost their functions. Rearranged and reconfigured in a mysterious structure, in a renewed pattern, they form an unrecognizable and chaotic structure. Familiar household objects are sucked into a maelstrom of twisted wires and objects, creating a striking visual contrast, a confrontation between recognisable consumables and a state of disorder.
The hourglass is fed by hoses and liquids, symbolizing capitalist flows that have resulted in the accumulation of material possessions. In a way, the hourglass stands for a novelty item, an idea that drives consumer culture: it is indeed our collective obsession with novelty that erodes traditional cultures of maintenance and repair, enabling the rapid and relentless production of new goods.
But that's not the only metaphor behind this structure: usually an hourglass symbolises mortality and death itself. Here death is implicit in the physical accumulation of materials, the result of our overconsumption often exercised through intangible interactions (nowadays we don't even need to be physically in a shop to buy something, we can just go online, look for something we want/need, choose it, click and buy it).
As we have become accustomed to accumulate not just physical objects but digital images, invisible data and files that may become inaccessible in future as technology progresses and certain supports and software become obsolete, maybe one day we will also have artists building intangible Babel towers of our immaterial digital clutter. In the meantime, Scott will have enough raw materials to fashion her very tangible works of art, bringing in this way attention to the perpetual nature of our excessive overconsumption patterns.
Image credits for this post
1 - 2. Installing The Circadian Cul-de-sac, 2023. Images by Hyun Lee.
3, 4 and 5. The making of The Circadian Cul-de-sac by Erika Scott.
6. Erika Scott, The Circadian Cul-de-sac, 2023. Installation view, The National 4: Australian Art Now, Carriageworks. Photo: Zan Wimberley.
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