the far-away faint glimmer of a consciousness more acute

Collaboration with Steven Rendall 2022

Acrylic on plastic, embroidery on linen

28 x 15.5 x 14 cm

the far-away faint glimmer of a consciousness more acute

at Sarah Scout Presents , Melbourne

This ongoing studio-based collaboration between Steven Rendall and Andrea Eckersley explores the material intersections of fashion and painting. Steven’s contribution functions to restage and re-perform various categories of fragmented images into paint onto discarded television and computer stands that Andrea then sympathetically adorns and dresses. The plastic panel supports have protrusions and holes that interrupt the expected flat surface of a painting, thereby creating problems that painting alone is unable to adequately address. Andrea creates garment like coverings for these problems selecting highly apposite material arrays to adorn the paintings. In the artists’ conversations the uncategorisable nature of these works is reminiscent of Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines yet more aligned with the scale of Richard Tuttle’s Compartmentalization (2008).

These scavenged plastic bases are a substratum extracted from the flow of materials in our everyday lives. Repurposed, they become bases for new expressions, new forms, new possibilities. The work has a thrifting or gleaning like quality, it incorporates found materials, fabric interventions and garment construction. To work with the plastic moulded forms Steven fabricates collages of images taken from art auction catalogues, occult encyclopedias, horror film anthologies and so on, always diffracting and refracting the source materials through fragmentation, misprision, envy and critique. This process complicates the picture plane. The ensuing painted surfaces result in limitations, opportunities and comforts that are all compromised by the holes and protrusions of the plastic supports.

Each painted surface invites and invokes interventions for Andrea’s decorative methods in construction to perform. These paintings are bodies needing to be dressed, inviting further possibilities that are expressed via the extraordinarily subtle construction of sleeves, gathered cloaks or accents built out of necklace-like accumulations. Andrea, like Tuttle, collects textiles which she manipulates and uses to ‘respond’ to the compositions, colours and textures of Steven’s paintings. Whilst it is evident that a garment may provide protection or be used as adornment to indicate status, garments may also be understood as social, affective and material expressions of subjectivity. These dressed painted arrangements remind us that the ‘meaning’ of a garment, material, effect or force, cannot be determined in isolation of the assemblages in which it circulates, or more directly, the encounters in which it participates.

Henry James’ short story, The Turn of the Screw, shared from one artist to another, supplies a further diffraction within the assemblage methods on display here. The far-away faint glimmer of a consciousness more acute is a line where James describes how the governess identifies her own delayed dawn of an idea in the housekeeper’s impassive misunderstanding. Like the faint glimmers in James’ text, Steven Rendall and Andrea Eckersley have discovered a generative opportunity to see these objects otherwise, pushing them into unfamiliar, uncomfortable and obscure aesthetic arrangements.

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Gold Shibori

Collaboration with Steven Rendall, 2022

Acrylic on plastic with synthetic fabric

40 x 21.5 x 16cm

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Lilac Denim

Collaboration with Steven Rendall, 2019

Acrylic on plastic, cotton denim

19 x 13 x 7 cm

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Implosion.Explosion