Contemporary Australia: Women

157 The first time I viewed Louise Weaver’s new work I had to slow down. Entranced by its enmeshed textures, I thought of the act of meditatively rolling paper to form the sculptural bird hide, as well as its suggestion of hours spent quietly still, watching a landscape for movement and life. Ideas of an inside and outside appeared strongly present. I wondered about a space that enabled one to be alert to not only what was happening outside of the space articulated by the screen, but of also one’s own listening, watching body. Looking, concealment and the ways that we inhabit space all seem very important to Weaver. Skilfully constructed from disparate materials, Weaver’s work for ‘Contemporary Australia: Women’ features five different sculptural elements — paper, timber, foam, room fragrance and linen — that invite individual contemplation, as well as contributing to the sense of an overall composition. Despite its strong presence in space, Weaver clearly articulates that the sculptures comprising this piece ‘work as a composition of related elements rather than as an installation’. 1 This situates her work in relation to the two‑dimensional space of painting, and — in the context of this exhibition — recalls the history of Western painting where women have often been depicted as objects of a male viewer’s gaze. Weaver cites French modernist painter Édouard Manet’s Woman with a parrot 1866 as an early inspiration, and, like this painting, her new works deliver a complex web of elements that engage and challenge our ideas of how women might inhabit space and engage in the act of looking and being looked at. 2 In Manet’s painting, the model Victorine Meurent is depicted with five objects that symbolically stand in for the five senses: a monocle symbolising the act of looking has been casually dropped; Victorine lifts a sprig of violets to her nose, asserting the presence of her other senses. Thus her involvement in her own space is evident as she gazes back out of the painting. Weaver also deliberately introduces sensory cues that enable different spaces of engagement for visitors and viewers — sound, smell and texture can be found, most notably, through the presence of recorded birdsong and the subtle introduction of fragrance. The exquisite, glittering screen of Bird Hide 2011 provides a backdrop for these engagements — situating the viewer as the viewed, as well as proposing a private space for experiences stimulated by Weaver’s sensory cues. The hide recalls not only the temporary structures created for viewing birds, but also Islamic decorative screens such as the mashrabiyya of North African domestic architecture. Both establish a boundary between public and private space that does not impede the flow of air, light or vision. Both enable people to engage in the dynamics of how they are seen, thus establishing a more embodied, performative space. Such spaces recall ceremonial grounds where Pacific masks come to dance, and where spectacular sculptural and ritual objects, such as masks, evoke an emotionally charged event. In the same way, Weaver’s Bird Hide employs dynamic patterns and glittering surfaces aimed at inducing a sense of transcendence; however, in both ceremonial masks and Weaver’s work an audience’s emotional response is not merely due to the beauty of these objects. Rather, it is the result of correspondences that manifest between the mask or sculptural elements and the sounds, colours, rhythms and fragrances otherwise present at the time. Staged in front of Bird Hide , Weaver’s four sculptures — Much Deeping (column with growth) 2011, Hiding in plain sight (witch grass nest) 2011–12, Dark Cherry 2011–12, Butterfly (with inclined wings) 2012 — also appear less as objects than as events. This is partially the result of their placement as part of a dynamic space of engagement and partially due to their refusal to be easily known. Combining a twentieth‑century Japanese bamboo pole with foam, fibreglass and crocheted carbon fibre, wool, lurex and steel, Much Deeping (column with growth) invites contemplation of the very different — and possibly subjective — histories associated with the materials. It is hard not to wonder at the work’s extraordinary materiality, and the almost talismanic way in which Weaver has combined these materials. There is a strong sense of careful craftsmanship and purpose. Indeed, Weaver states: I am interested in the relationship the work has to industrial/interior design — ‘making your Louise Weaver Australia b.1966 Bird Hide (detail) 2011 Japanese paper, plastic, wooden beads, glitter, monofilament, linen thread, wire, sound, synthetic polymer emulsion 450 x 540cm Louise Weaver Louise Weaver A room of one’s own