Donna Marcus, Code, 2006. Collection Gallery HOTA.
Donated through the Australian Government's
Cultural Gifts Program 2017. On display in exhibition Donna Marcus: Radiate, Gallery HOTA, Gold Coast, Queensland, until April 28.
In 2001 Donna Marcus started regularly visiting a scrap metal yard between her workplace on Queensland's Gold Coast and her home on Tamborine Mountain in the Gold Coast hinterland. At the scrapyard, she was searching for second-hand domestic objects for her sculptural assemblages but was particularly seeking the square lids of Sunbeam aluminium frying pans, which were once so ubiquitous in Australian kitchens. "A lovely guy would save these big bale loads of frying pan lids for me," Marcus says. "I couldn't get that many lids from the op shop, so I had to go to the scrap metal yard." Having collected the frying pan lids, Marcus would spend days sorting and cleaning them. She then created works such as Code, from 2006, a gridded arrangement consisting of 64 lids, but with the knobs of the lids removed to reveal worn patterns. "The lids are just beautiful," she says. "How could you not use them? The whiteness of the lids is fantastic, and they just become white paintings as soon as you put them together. But these were things just from the kitchen and a scrapyard, and you can't get anything better that came out of the bin. It was like mining this rich seam of frying pan lids on the Gold Coast, and I didn't find them anywhere else."Marcus's Code is in the collection of Gallery HOTA on the Gold Coast and is currently in an exhibition,
Donna Marcus: Radiate. At the gallery, the acting head of curatorial and programs, Sam Creyton, says that Code is a compelling installation, assembled into a modernist and formalist grid with a layered sense of cultural and historical meaning. "A long-term resident of the Gold Coast hinterland and nationally acclaimed artist, Marcus is a dedicated collector of domestic and industrial material exploring the formal properties of composition, form, and pattern - in much the same way as an abstract painter might," Creyton says. "In Code, Marcus treats these 64 aluminium objects as the medium, building a minimalist work of scale capturing logical complexity in concise abstraction." Marcus's works emerge from nostalgia, using both domestic objects and industrial materials, Creyton says. "I wonder how many meals did these lids steam and dream into existence. Who ate the food made in them? Why did they let them go? In this striking installation Marcus configures the journey from purpose to obsolescence and back again, articulately playing a game of addition and subtraction with her signature clarity of expression."
Donna Marcus will also be showing new work in an exhibition, Pallet, at Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, Sydney, from March 21 to May 5.
Materials: aluminium and synthetic polymer paint
Dimensions: 274 x 274 x 10cm
