Shape and Colour, Social, July - August 2021

Opening remarks

Before I moved to Tasmania, I lived in Barcelona Spain for six years. I lived in the heart of the old quarter, the Barrio Gottico, whose dark meandering streets were enclosed by grimy stuccoed walls that bore the traces of decades of human interaction; the pitted, scared, gouged walls marked the passing of time and people; they bore the traces not just of movement and flow but also the enduring human need to mark, score and incise into the surfaces around them, simple but profound messages: I am here, I love you, to hell with the government.

 During the Civil War in Spain these walls were not just sites of commonplace graffiti but sites of resistance, messages passed between clandestine fighters, calls to action, pleas for information about a missing lover. Often the messages would be in the form of symbols and images to thwart so as to not be readable to the Fascist forces.

 Later, after the war the Spanish/Catalan artist Antoni Tapies would take this impulse to mark and score the matter of walls and turn into into a way of working in the studio, transforming thickly encrusted paintings, sculptures and ceramics into zones of communication whose messages were abstracted, symbolic, informal and yet seemingly of great import.

 The reason I mention the old walls of Barcelona, Tapies and Spanish Informalismo is because it allows me to hold together the work of the artists in this inaugural exhibition at Social. Around us we can see works by Brendan Huntley, Georgia Morgan, Martin Poppelwell, Enrique Tochez-Anderson and Jake Walker. No doubt each artist has very different concerns but Ainsley Macaulay’s astute curation presents us with a playful informalism, an opportunity to see the matter of clay, stoneware and paint becoming an expressive medium whose messages and aspirations are incised into the matter of their making. Yes, there is a looseness of line and sensitive gesture, of imperfect form, of slumped edges and colour freed of association (or not) but right now I kind of feel that that’s what we need more of: the expression of our imperfect selves, our imprecise ideas and, at the heart of it, our need to share, to find the matter of our social being. By the way, there’s a great essay by Dominic Symes that accompanies that does the work more justice than I can do here. Please do read it. 

 So, it is very fitting that this is the inaugural exhibition to open SAC’s newest venture: SOCIAL whose mission is to bring our community together in a space of multi-modal experimentation, play and discovery. We don’t know yet where this space might go, what it might become, it is in a way, that freshly stuccoed wall waiting to be inscribed by the community to whom it belongs. Watch this space, subscribe and keep in touch – we will be looking for your expressions of interest!

 Congratulations to the artist in this show, congratulations to Ainsley and the rest of the SAC team. 

More information is available here: SOCIAL