Edward Waring – Instinctive Travels
Edward Waring is drawn to found objects. He seeks them out in auction showrooms and on the cluttered shelves of charity shops, reassembling them into new forms which explore the history of sculpture, the role of memory, and our relationship to the materials that accumulate around us across our lifetimes. The Sydney-based artist has created successive bodies of work which, while visually distinctive, share aesthetic and conceptual through- lines: from a children’s game to a favourite tinned food, from once-loved dolls to dust-collecting ornaments. The title of this exhibition riffs on the title of a 1990 record from A Tribe Called Quest, People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm. The hip hop group employed a diverse range of samples on the album, an approach sympathetic with Waring’s studio practice.
The works in Instinctive Travels, which Waring has dubbed memory sticks, investigate the potential of vintage crystal and glass. Anyone who came of age in 20th century Australia or (in Waring’s case) New Zealand, will recognise these once prized gifts and cherished heirlooms, which gradually accumulated in crystal cabinets and on mantlepieces across the suburbs. Set aside for a worthy occasion which never seemed to actually arise, they eventually made their way in droves to second-hand shops where they sit, still bearing the original stickers, gathering dust, a reflection of changing tastes and values.
Working instinctively in his ‘crystal lab’ to find formal balance in combinations of dishes, vases, ashtrays and candle-holders, the objects of his fascination have been turned on their heads, and accentuated through the introduction of colour. Waring paints the volume rather than the surface of these vessels, highlighting their interior curves and allowing light to play across the dimensions of the glass. The melancholy contained within these relics from a fading way of life, makes way for a warmer nostalgia, in which they are literally filled with colour and brought to life. Once upended, functionality gives way to form, and the viewer is drawn to the details, where transparent ubiquity had previously rendered them with a sameness.
Early works in this series drew on the epergne, or decorative rococo table centrepiece. As more unusual glass pieces began to assert their potential amongst the clusters of crystal clones on Waring’s studio shelves, these compositions have evolved into stacked totemic forms which travel across the sculptural landscape from ancient cultural objects, through to modernist sculpture, through to a contemporary artistic context. In their echoing of the human form and their suggestions of the organic within the man-made, they become more than the sum of their parts, conjuring new resonance. Like Swiss-born artist Ugo Rondinone’s iconic fluorescent land art piece Seven Magic Mountains (2016-21) in Nevada, USA, and the crochet-covered gourd sculptures of Melbourne artist Louise Weaver, Waring’s memory sticks belong to a contemporary art historical movement in which colour and totemic assemblage are explored as means to transform unremarkable materials into striking meeting points for past, present and future.
The exhibition also includes a number of new works from the artist’s series of champagne tables. These occasional tables are also built from stacked crystal, however unlike Waring’s memory sticks they remain transparent, lending themselves to a role as a spectacular support act rather than a colourful leading lady. The form and moniker of the champagne tables brings to mind a coupe à champagne, the wide-rimmed glass from which bubbles would slosh and spill with the gestures of the relaxed drinker.
Waring has layered personal, social and cultural histories in these works. Many are titled with women’s names of an earlier era, an homage to the friends of Waring’s mother whom he remembers in their drinking and partying heyday, occasions where glasses were filled to the brim with colour and clinking to life. These women’s individual stories, like those of these objects, can only be imagined. Other works feature song titles, notably from the Ryley Walker album Course In Fable, which became the studio soundtrack to this body of work. The distinct pastel and high-key palette, instinctively selected in complimentary combinations, subliminally entered Waring’s practice via the Moebius comic books which he read voraciously in his youth. Now, these colours invite the viewer to imagine the wine, sweets, candles or cigarettes that might have rested within these crystal containers – had they not been ‘kept for best’.
Chloé Wolifson, July 2023
