Fiona Halse Solo Exhibition at Stephen Mc Laughlan Gallery ( 8 – 25 February 2017)

 

Fiona Halse’s series of large abstract paintings are concerned with the visceral. The marks and structure within Halse’s work derive from the architectonic and relates to the human figure’s internal feeling. These works are linked with Tachist and Lyrical Abstraction traditions and intuitive, lateral approaches to picture making are embraced. Her work values drawing, formalism and affective composition, but she also seeks to capture passages in space where the subconscious and unconscious can be transcribed. Halse has an interest in metaphoric form and how this can be transferred through the hand, materials and through praxis and this is evident in the texture and mark making in her work.  Abstraction to Halse is an idealised state, and form can be a summarised essence that is stripped and re-discovered.

 

These large paintings connect with the viewer physically and forms replicate structures that evoke the sense of a human body and there is an offering to the viewer to enter through virtual pictorial space.  But often spaces become closed, passages vague, dense, and saturated with colour. Halse’s space is private and ambiguous.  A series of black paintings preceded the works in this exhibition and there are still traces of scaffold, black marks and spaces that have been found, moved, erased and re-discovered. 

 

Whilst there are several large paintings on exhibition, there will also be a selection of small works on paper and collages created in two arts residencies in Berlin.

 

Exhibition Details:

Exhibition: 8 - 25 February 2017

Location: Stephen Mc Laughlan Gallery

Address: Level 8, Room 16, Nicholas Building 37, Swanston Street, Melbourne, Australia

Hours:. Wednesday - Friday: 1pm - 5pm; Saturday: 11am - 5pm

Opening: Saturday 11 February, 2pm -5pm

Web: www.stephenmclaughlangallery.com.au

Email: st73599@bigpond.net.au

Phone: 0407 317 323 
      

Installation views of Exhibition:          

 

 

 

 

 

 

Details of paintings:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Collages:

 

 

Video:

 

Art created at Institut Für Alles Mögliche ( Berlin)

Artist residence November 2016
www.i-a-m.tk

Video created by Institut Für Alles Mögliche ( Berlin)

One minute snapshot video created for artist residency at Institut Für Alles Mögliche, ( I-A-M), Zentrale, Berlin-Wedding, Germany 

November 2016

www.i-a-m.tk

Referential Berlin: One Day Exhibition ( 19 November 2016)

(Above image: Jason Haufe, 2016, 12.2, 20cm 27.5cm, Photocopy collage on canvas)

Referential Berlin: One Day Exhibition

Date: Saturday, 19 November, 2016, 2pm - 9pm

Location: 

Institut Für Alles Mögliche, ( I-A-M), Zentrale,

Schererstrasse 11,

13347 Berlin-Wedding,

Germany

Organisation: Institut Für Alles Mögliche ( I-A-M)  (Institute for everything that could be possible / Institute for random stuff)

Website: http://www.i-a-m.tk

Facebook: www.facebook.com/IAM.Pressestelle

This group exhibition is part of an open studios initiative at Zentrale I-A-M Berlin artist residency for Australian artists Fiona Halse and Jason Haufe. This one day exhibition will profile work created by Fiona Halse and Jason Haufe whilst in Berlin and work profiled at Berliner Liste.

Alongside an open studio of Fiona Halse and Jason Haufe, artists from Australia, Europe and New York will exhibit works that are connected to collage. This exhibition will explore the use of paper and found objects to construct space and tactile responses to materials assembled through formal principles. Accidents and found materials can be used as a referential point and can provide a touchstone and can instigate ideas for passages or direction. Collage as a medium and device to build space, create variation in form to enable and activate plasticity will be exhibited.

Artists - responding to collage as a device to create form:

Benjy Barnhart (Munich) 
Barnhart catalogue

Peter Bonner ( New York) 
Bonner catalogue

Kathy Caraccio (New York) 
Caraccio catalogue

Fiona Halse (Australia)
Halse catalogue

Eleanor Hart (Australia)
Hart catalogue

Jason Haufe  ( Australia) 
Haufe catalogue

Theo Strasser (Australia) 
Strasser catalogue

Artists - responding to collage in terms of its relationship to assemblage and responding directly to materials:

Stan Van Steendam (Brussels)
Van Steendam catalogue

Christina Fischer ( Berlin)
Fischer catalogue

Artist – responding directly with materials and its application:

Panos Famelis (Greece)
Famelis catalogue

Link to Curator statement ( Fiona Halse)

Link to Media release

 Van Steendam( left), Strasser ( middle), Haufe ( right)

 Van Steendam ( left), Strasser ( left -middle), Haufe ( middle), Bonner ( right)

  Bonner ( left), Halse (middle), Famelis ( right)

Haufe ( left), Bonner (left-middle), Barnhart ( middle), Fischer ( right)

 Hart ( left), Caraccio ( middle), Strasser (left)

 Fischer ( left), Halse ( left- middle), Hart ( middle), Caraccio ( right- middle), Strasser ( right)

Halse ( left), Van Steendam ( left- middle), Strasser (middle), Haufe ( right)

More Information: Curator - Fiona Halse – fionahalse@gmail.com

Imagery

My work is created through a Tachist approach and I choose to use the term ‘poemagogic imagery’ due to the word ‘image’ being confused with narrative, photography and notion of art being preconceived. When I create art I do not consider that I am creating an image. I consider my work an embodied object that has been created through feeling and form.  A virtual world is created through the picture plane and the essence of any imagery, or memory it provokes has been idealised through an abstraction. This approach may be considered reductive or conceptual – but my interest in art making is connected to Lyrical, Tachism and Abstract Expressionism and could be considered Post-painterly or even Romantic.  

 

Whilst I value formalism, the spaces I seek to create are not derivative of a Greenberg flat space and I aim to capture a virtual pictorial world within my work - not an image. Spaces I create are often ambiguous, hidden and architectonic and marks on the picture plane are considered passages and areas. Whilst I acknowledge there is a proliferation of multi-discipline practise and artists reacting to Greenberg through extending their canvas off the wall into situational painting, BMT, installation and alike. I choose to create art that values pictorial problem solving and drawing is a direct method to access this cognitive and affective domain.  My work relates to forms that convey internal human feelings and states of being. This poetic based approach to capturing a visual percept is in Rothko’s monoloithic forms, tactile spaces of Hamilton and Hesse, Kandinsky and Klee’s theories and art informal influenced artists such as Twombly and Tapies.  Drawing offers solutions for formalism that have struggled to come to terms with the proclaimed ‘death of painting’ and conceptual theories of painting. Drawing to me is a conduit to the unconscious inner life of the artist and ‘Poemagogic images. It is this essential space that is connected to the unconscious that I am interested in capturing within my work and seek to understand.

Thoughts on: Drawing, Poiesis, Praxis, form and feeling

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. Aristotle – Poetics  

I seek to understand how art can capture the unconscious and metaphoric form and how this is transcribed and applied through the material and directly by the artist’s hand. I am interested in visceral space and how syncretic forms  described by Ehrenzweig’s in the Hidden Order of Art as ‘poemagogic’ can be shaped by formalist principles and Plasticity. Drawing as a practise enables these cognitive and affective connections to be recorded directly and the immediacy and flexibility of the medium allows for the unconscious to be captured.  I am interested in exploring abstraction in Matthew Collings’statement that ‘form is feeling’

My work has always been based on internal architectonic forms that relate to mood and remain as a residue of feeling. The space in my work is private, idealised and invites the viewer to enter through illusion, but passages create ambiguity. The content of my work is about capturing this feeling and I am curious to explore whether this felt internal space links with the concept of Poiesis and if this space that could possibility be  Poemagogic and can be transcribed through Praxis and  drawing.

Poiesis as a concept that links to Ehrenzweig’s ‘poemagogic’, ‘percepts’ and even what Diana Pethridge refers to as Deleuze and Guatari’s ‘Rhizomic model’ interests me. Poiesis as a word derives from poetry and to me this word has metaphorical and idealised formal connotations.  This term was also utilised by Heidegger as a concept describing the ‘bringing forth’ process whilst creating an art work. There has been a longstanding relationship between Poiesis and Praxis since Aristotle and the term Poiesis is often used in science as  meaning ‘creation, production’. I have an interest in Poiesis as a word that can describe metaphor and creation  and Praxis as an application. Praxis links with materiality, Greenberg’s ‘media purity’ concepts and the medium being applied through action or marks or as a ‘verb’

My work is connected to formalism and modernism and I am interested in drawing in terms of what Diana Pethridge refers to in the Primacy of Drawing  as ‘affective semiotics of design and composition’.  I am also interested in how  Kandinsky’s  ‘necessity’ and purity of form  can be formally organised though drawing and applied through the hand. My work is connected to Tachism, it is also connected to the Malevich’s ‘fourth dimension’ non-objective idealised concepts - but I seek to utilise formal devices through applying drawing principles. Drawing directly within painting and collages allows me to create compositions that are not pre-conceived. Drawing also allows a process to find the work and tap into what Ehrenzweig’s describes as’ 'polyphony' and 'poemagogic ' phantasy. Drawing  can also construct space through erasure, collage and line and this direct medium often uses juxtaposing devices and visual tension and this becomes a spacial platform. This constructed space created through drawing is a visual pathway and the viewer can travel on Kandinsky’s ‘point, line to plane’.  I  have an interest in understanding how I can access and transcribe the unconscious ‘Hidden Order of Art’ through materials and plastic application of form.  I am intrigued by drawing’s ability to be direct, immediate and ‘primal’ and translate the senses through the hand.