Accretion/
Abrasion

Accretion/Abrasion
27 July to 13 August 2022

Jacqueline Aust, Anthea Boesenberg,  Kathy Boyle and Gary Shinfield

The works of the artists engage with the relationship between photography, memory, and the passage of time, and often seek to evoke a sense of the uncanny or otherworldly through the use of imagery and technique. In activating a practice of spectrality, the artists re-compose dominant historical narratives through methodologies of trace, refraction, distortion and diffusion. These strategies are recomposed into new spectral entities of affect and resistance. The artists are unified through a material interest in lens-based practices, and how the history of photography is linked with practices that define both the landscape and capital economies that extract from place.

Connecting with land and place, with histories, geologies and memories, helps these four artists, two Australian and two New Zealanders, deal with the dilemmas of change. Whether permanent or precarious, personal or political, poetic or polemic these artists solicit form and material to put a stake in the ground. At this moment, they say, “we stand with a view of a place, or this place, capturing the reverberations of ‘now’ as a record and perhaps as a way to step forward”. With an established practice in printmaking and working on paper, the artists develop their ideas in relation to processes of change over time, Accretion and Abrasion.

The works of New Zealand artist Jacqueline Aust chart her navigation of new environments. Each journey begins with marks inscribed in a matrix, a map. Accumulated layers refer to previous experience or notions of home … obscuring and revealing, tracing a path from past to future, with history as a residue to build on. Sydney based artist Anthea Boesenberg’s works celebrate the age and endurance of an ancient landscape. Multi panelled rust prints, like the landscape they represent, continue to degrade over time. Kathy Boyle is a New Zealand printmaker whose work examines accretion in geological terms of collision, and subduction. She uses a variety of materials, paper, plaster, metal to express her ideas. Gary Shinfield is an artist based near Sydney. His works began as a series of woodcuts, and he uses printmaking and painting techniques to create images that become more abstracted and fragmented in response to living in a time of constant and accelerating change.

The artists in this exhibition trace a path through spaces affected by ever-present forces of accretion and abrasion, around us and within.

Jacqueline Aust,  Anthea Boesenberg,    Kathy Boyle,  Gary Shinfield

Images courtesy and © the artists

Photography GCS Gallery