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.

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.

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.

Verticality 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.