Contemporary Australia: Women

121 Sandra Selig Australia b.1972 heart of the air you can hear 2011 Spun polyester, nails, paint 280 x 560 x 285.5cm Installation views, ‘Networks (cells and silos)’, Monash University Museum of Art, 2011 Images courtesy: The artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane Contemporary physics tells us that the mysteries of the universe can be revealed through examining its smallest constituent parts. Scientists at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Switzerland, are exploring this by using the Large Hadron Collider to attempt to recreate the big bang or reveal the existence of the God particle. In a similar way, art can play a role in illuminating the unseen and the unknown in the world around us. In this manner, Sandra Selig’s practice speaks of the many secrets of the universe. Collapsing the boundaries between microcosm and macrocosm, her art alludes to the complex systems present in nature and those governing the cosmos. In the past, Selig has created works using spider webs collected from her garden. These often unnoticed architectural marvels present a contradictory mix of strength and fragility. In nature, spider webs spun with an invisible silk thread are exposed only when caught by rays of sunlight or when they are heavy with morning dew. Similarly, Selig works to bring what is hidden in nature to light. For her collectively titled series ‘universes’ 2007, spider webs were spray‑painted in fluorescent hues and mounted against black paper. Deterritorialised from their natural state, these webs direct us to something far beyond the backyard. Their astronomical forms suggest the cosmos, ordinarily unseen by the naked eye. By abstracting spider webs in this way, Selig highlights the delicate complexity of the natural world and ‘alludes to a cosmic relation between the forms of nature and celestial patterns’. 1 In ‘Contemporary Australia: Women’, Selig draws on this aesthetic to generate a sculptural presence within the Gallery space. Her thread-based installation prisms remember you 2012, ‘contrasts the simplicity of gallery architecture to complex geometrical arrangements found in the natural world’. 2 Like a spider web, her installation presents itself as a finished work of art; it is the end product of a repeated series of meditative and choreographed movements, backwards and forwards in the Gallery space. Every thread traces the artist’s movement, like the visible brushstrokes in a painting. In a sense, the work represents an embodied production of space. As with the spider’s web, the anterior architecture of prisms remember you represents a space once inhabited, this time by the artist. The form of the work evokes musical associations as well, with an array of taut threads appearing as harp strings waiting to be plucked — suggesting resonance, vibration, harmony and frequency. The illusory quality of the work fills the empty space of the Gallery in the same way as the intangible volume of sound. Soundwaves are among the infinitely variant energy patterns that surround us and represent an endless source of poetic potential for Selig. To listen involves a physiological reception of rhythmic waves and audible vibrations. In prisms remember you , sound operates in dialogue with the physical installation, transmitted via headphones to produce a compressed and intimate experience of the interiority of the work. The audio not only echoes the spatial acoustics of the installation, but was recorded on a custom-made instrument based on the form of the work itself. As a kind of micro version or scale model, Selig’s instrument replaced thread with guitar strings, and wooden blocks in the place of gallery walls, fixed together with eyehooks and buttons. Selig’s use of everyday materials and her focus on the physicality of art making are also informed by principles of the Gutai group — a mid-twentieth century Japanese art movement. As stated in the group’s manifesto by leading member Jiro Yoshihara, the Gutai artists aimed to ‘combine human creative ability with the characteristics of the material in order to concretise the abstract space’. 3 Selig’s work, for its material basis and cosmological references, is similarly concrete in form yet spatially abstract. When seen from a distance prisms remember you appears flat, a mere diagram on the wall. Recalling the earlier spider web works, her thread-based installation appears like a scientific graph that mysteriously represents an unseen force in the natural world. But upon closer inspection it becomes clear that, with a network of interconnecting spun polyester strands, the work is more like a delicate drawing in three dimensions, a fragile sculptural creation of positive and negative space. Sandra Selig Sandra Selig Visible traces of the infinite