Kindling is an ignition - a quiet beginning gaining momentum, moving towards inevitable change. This energy and movement is explored in Victoria Hempstead’s first solo exhibition with Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert.
As a response to the recent Australian bushfires of 2019 and 2020, Kindling grew from a need to witness and respond to the aftermath. Using her existing metal practice, Hempstead incorporates the materials collected from various sites including charcoal, bark and ash. On her journey through various sites, Hempstead recognised the significance of environmental stressors on the Australian bush. These stressors and the sense of urgency that accompany them are reflected in her work which highlights the opposite states of permanence and ephemerality, of landscape and body, of control and chaos. A convergence of sculpture and mark-making, performance and installation, Hempstead allows her medium and process to play heavily into the dialogue of her pieces. Time is represented as both a continuous motion and visual material; each gesture creates a link between artist and material. In the process of creation, the visual language is presented as an intersection of memory, navigation and place.
The artist wishes to acknowledge and pay respect to the Birpai people of the Port Macquarie-Hastings region, the Worimi people of the Great Lakes region, the Cadigal and Wangal people of the Sydney region, the Darug people of the Hawkesbury and Blue Mountains region, on which the Kindling works were inspired and created. She acknowledges that sovereignty was never ceded, and pays her respects to the Traditional Owners of country, including their Elders past, present and emerging, and recognises their continued connection to the land, waters and culture.
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BENEATH THE MAP
Hempstead’s paper-based practice is a unique form of navigation, “it’s a search for myself, my place, my connection to not only my surrounding environment, but the times we live in.” Informally termed as memory sketches, the collection of works display the use of a repetitive mark-making technique, whereby Hempstead intricately slices into the surface of the paper. The delicate and precise incisions create three-dimensional surfaces reminiscent of bird flight patterns or ocean tidal sequences. This form of re-mapping allows Hempstead to explore what lies beneath the limitation of the map and western cartography to instead focus on the undulations of terrain, the warmth and texture of the ground. The influence of the walks through Australian bushland is echoed throughout her mappings. Experienced in person, the work’s triangular cut shapes act as a sun-dial, time-lapsing the surrounding daylight and present an intimate visual experience.
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WORKS ON METAL
Following the 2019 and 2020 bushfire season, Hempstead roamed through various sites that had been seriously affected by the fires. Noticing the impression that had been left on the landscape, Hempstead imitates this process in her metal practice. As a result, Hempstead brings direct attention to the impact of the bushfires on the environment. To highlight this impact, Hempstead creates a naturally made solution in which she pours over mild steel, causing corrosion to occur, immediately creating defects in the steel’s surface. Similar to the Australian landscape, the strength of the steel is tested and pushed to its limits. With time, the solution evaporates but continues to erode the steel, creating an evolving work. The endurance of the steel as it withstands the process of erosion is reflective of the perseverance of Australian bushland in extreme weather and a testimony to the perseverance of people as individuals as a society in dire circumstances.
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Victoria HempsteadPaperbark I (Melaleuca Quinquenervia), 2020mild steel, water (evaporated), salt, resin120 x 120 cm
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Victoria HempsteadPaperbark II (Melaleuca Quinquenervia), 2020mild steel, water (evaporated), salt, resin120 x 120 cm
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Victoria HempsteadOld Man Banksia I (Banksia serrata), 2020mild steel, water (evaporated), salt, resin120 x 120 cm
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Victoria HempsteadBlood Marmalade I, 2020mild steel, water (evaporated), salt, resin70 x 50 cm
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Victoria HempsteadBlood Marmalade II, 2020mild steel, water (evaporated), salt, resin70 x 50 cm
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Victoria HempsteadOld Man Banksia II (Banksia serrata), 2020mild steel, water (evaporated), salt, resin70 x 50 cm$ 1,800.00
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HUDDLE
Inspired by the human characteristics of tree trunk’s huddled remains as encountered during walks through devastated bushland, the works reference two individuals embracing and the vulnerability that arises from this moment. The sculptures purposefully retain the fragility of the material to cite the powers of creation and destruction as two magnetically linked forces.
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ABOUT VICTORIA HEMPSTEAD
Victoria Hempstead is a multi-disciplinary artist, working primarily with mark-making, sculptures and installation. Driven by material process and a curiosity towards contradictory concepts, Hempstead’s work engages with ideas highlighting ecological stressors, the body’s ephemeral relationship to the land, and the craving for a deeper connection with the world around us as a basic struggle between constancy and change. With her core practice based in metal, Hempstead integrates other natural materials such as wood and paper, as well as found materials from her frequent walks in the Australian bush. The surface of her works mimic the peeling, shedding and ageing qualities of the skin, giving the works a subtle sensitivity and vulnerability. This vulnerability further highlights the material’s shift between solidity and impermanence.
Hempstead has recently been named a finalist in this year’s Basil Sellers Art Award and has also been awarded the Art Incubator Grant for 2020. In 2019, Hempstead was named a finalist in the Kennedy Prize, the Clayton Utz Art Award and the Incinerator Art Award. She was the recipient of the University Postgraduate Award (2011) and completed her Master of Fine Arts at Parsons, The New School of Design (NYC) and Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney.
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EXHIBITION ESSAY
BY JOE WILSONVerticality as a contemporary way of seeing is a consequence of humankind leaving the ground, taking to the air and looking down, jettisoning into orbit and beyond to look back upon the world.
When astronauts first glimpsed the fullness of our earth’s horizon framed in the darkness of space, we understood our mutual and fragile place in the universe. This mode of vertical viewing has developed further into something artificial and extraneous through the machine vision of satellites and unmanned drones. A panopticon era of an all-seeing eye looking down upon, surveilling the earth.
This verticality is there on the screens of our phones, we look down upon them, navigating via our google maps. It’s a shift away from the horizon into a downward single point perspective that informs our sense of place in the world. Media platforms powered by algorithms shape multiple variations of the world, Newsfeeds tailored to every individual. Such that it shifts the likelihood of common ground and shared experience.
We were still looking down at our screens as it happened. The smoke, the changed sky, and foreboding charge in the air; a land on fire. Inescapably, we were living through a cataclysmic event, telling of the times. The horizon had been brought into view.
Back in November 2019, when Victoria Hempstead ventured into the landscape after the Australian fire season, it was a place of wholesale destruction, an end of days for the former wildlife that called it home. She walked as a means to navigate artistic creation in a place fertile with the material of catastrophe. A way to be close-up and grounded in the shape of her own footfalls. Hempstead brings back from the landscape burnt remnants for the works Huddle. Pairings of bodily branches that divulge fragility and closeness, giving form to a shared view related to a specific event.
At the heart of Hempstead’s practice is steel. We think of metal in the context of its efficient strength, an engineering breakthrough that lifts buildings into the sky, spans rivers, and endures the weight of hurtling trains. However, when you work with metal it is more often counter to its rigid reputation. It needs protection and care to chemically stabilise; its surface is vulnerable, wanting to oxidise and fall away. Metal is more like a liquid; malleable and willing to curve and flow, open to new ideas as a responsive medium.
Hempstead’s works have an inherent vertical – horizontal relationship. I’m reminded of the mechanics of photography, the mirror flipping behind the lens, and the alchemical process of bathing photographic paper in developer, which is later hung vertically to dry. This, a fluctuation and instability in modes of seeing that is both forward and downward.
Topographical metal works hang like paintings, abstract corrosions of macro and micro vertical visions. They are reminiscent of aerial views of strip mines, but the titles directly reference the textures of tree barks. This is a continuation of shifting perspectives, coming from a distance into proximity from the air to the ground. The works change states again by moving upward from the studio floor, where they were created, to the gallery wall. A rhythm that is reflected across Hempstead’s practice in the large cartographic paper artwork, Beneath the Map. Here the piece unfurls in a grand gesture over both wall and floor surfaces, its subtle details near and far.
The title, Beneath the Map, brings to mind the Situationist slogan ‘Beneath the pavement, the beach’. It strikes me as talking about what lies beneath the structures that dominate the environment; something natural and raw below. The Situationist pastime of the dérive, was to wander aimlessly. It was a method of engaging with the streets in psychogeography, to absorb the energy and flow, as a sense of place in the urban landscape. A situation causes pause to re-examine the position one is in.
An exhibition can be a situation to cause reflection. Appreciations that echo through Hempstead’s wandering and studio objects, presented as an encounter with a slow and thoughtful material consideration.
Victoria Hempstead’s exhibition and practice, speaks to a kindling of the willpower to navigate a path in this sideways world and in the relationships that bind people together. She grounds vision with objective pieces, literal things, worn steel, charred branches, and bent paper; that display vulnerability and attention given.
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Victoria Hempstead - Kindling
September 24, 2020 Victoria Hempstead, Old Man Banksia II (Banksia serrata), 2020. Mild steel, water (evaporated), salt and resin, 70 x 50cm. Courtesy: the artist and Gallery Sally Dan Cuthbert, Sydney. Kindling is... -
Victoria Hempstead - Kindling
September 1, 2020 Victoria Hempstead, Melaleuca Quinquenervia (Paperbark), 2020, mild steel, water (evaporated), salt, resin, 120 x 120 x 2 cm. GALLERY SALLY DAN-CUTHBERT Victoria Hempstead Kindling -
Victoria Hempstead - ART INCUBATOR’S 2020 GRANT RECIPIENTS
October 1, 2020 ART INCUBATOR’S 2020 GRANT RECIPIENTS Victoria Hempstead and Nadia Odlum to stage Sydney solos this October. Words: Erin Irwin The 2020 Art Incubator grant recipients, Victoria Hempstead and Nadia Odlum,...
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