Contemporary Australia: Women

167 FROST DRAWING FOR KALLANG (details) 2011 Ten-day drawing performance on the glass wall and glass windows, Old Kallang Airport, Singapore Biennale: Open House , Singapore. Project commissioned by 2011 Singapore Biernnale. Pigment markers on glass. Photo: Longin Sarnecki Image Courtesy: The artist, Singapore Biennale, Singapore and Fehily Contemporary, Melbourne Over time, Wlodarczak has extended her drawing to take in a wider variety of surfaces, moving her canvas and paper sheets from the walls to the floor and, more recently, draping them over objects such as tables, chairs and cars, as well as people’s bodies — a method she calls ‘drawing frottage’. These works create a ghostly trace of the object underneath, a kind of Turin Shroud impression that carries the history of its surroundings. They register an expansion of the work into the sphere of ordinary life, and integrate it more fully into Wlodarczak’s daily activities. Since 2008, she has undertaken a parallel series of projects in which she draws onto glass, a surface she considers a ‘membrane’ between one state of being and another, which allows the drawing to more completely inhabit and interact with its environment. These works are created over extended periods: Wlodarczak draws what passes behind the windows over that time, continually shifting her position and perspective in full view of passers-by, leaving behind a multifaceted image of her presence. The first, WITHIN 2008, was created on the windows of RMIT Project Space in Melbourne, which faced onto a busy street. The second, FROST DRAWING FOR KALLANG 2011, filled two walls of windows at Singapore’s Old Kallang Airport with drawings of the installation of the Singapore Biennale as it grew around her, while the third, FROST DRAWING FOR THE LIBRARY 2011, was made over one week on the windows of the La Trobe University Library. Wlodarczak’s new frost drawing, WINDOW-SHOPPING, FROST DRAWING FOR GOMA 2012 uses the soaring glass wall at the entrance of the Gallery of Modern Art as its base. Understanding the window’s ‘dress circle’ location at the front of the building as a site for display and self-presentation, she extends the performance by donning different daily outfits, drawing attention to her passion for clothes and the role that dressing-up plays in her emotional life. The viewer may participate through communication with the artist on one side of the glass or as a ‘window-shopper’ on the other side, setting up an inside/outside dialectic in which different modes of looking and interaction are mediated by the glass membrane. At the centre of it all is the artist’s body as a performer/mannequin, taking in the parade of looks and encounters, and using the medium of drawing to look back. Like Gosia Wlodarczak’s Facebook page, the work is simultaneously an invitation and a diary, a public space for feminine display that nevertheless retains its intensely individual, and private, core. Russell Storer Gosia Wlodarczak