Showcase for emerging talent

Posted: 13 Nov 2010  |  By: Trent Walter

Over several years, the Innovators Program at Linden Centre for Contemporary Art has evolved from an exhibition series in which artists rented space, sat the exhibition and installed the artwork themselves to an experience in which they receive technical, curatorial, marketing and, more recently, financial support.

The result has been a successful series of exhibitions showcasing new work by emerging artists that is as diverse as it is compelling. Innovators 3 presents the work of four individual artists and one artist duo whose works cover themes of movement, space and science.

Two artists, Laura Woodward and Matthew Gardiner, present kinetic sculptures. Woodward's Underwing 2010 is a wing-like form that occupies Gallery 1. Her works have recently been driven or animated by water and air, with gravity playing its part too. With its exposed wiring, multiple elements and mechanical design, Woodward's works are mysterious and formally alluring. This feeling is heightened by an overwhelming sense of the organic in her mechanical inventions. Gardiner's Oribotics [futurelab], 2010, is a continuing project in which the artist combines his passion for origami, biometrics and robotics. His oribot flower specimens, scientifically identified as Mechaniflorum Quinquiplicaticum, are a combination of 3D printing, moulding, laser cutting and hand fabrication. Physically they appear as mechanical, self-opening and -closing origami flowers that respond to viewer interaction.

The artist duo, Clare Peake and Tanya Shultz, is less scripted and more playful in its approach. Their installation, The problem of explaining the beginning of time, 2010, draws on a shared interest of using everyday materials with an eye for the candy coloured, into endless sculptural permutations. Though intimate in size, en masse the works create a dizzying collection of objects that revel in the joy of collaborative making. There is a playfulness to Wanda Gillespie's installation, too, though it is more like Borges's Fictions in its aspiration. A part of her Museum of Lost Worlds project, Escape into the Void, 2010, extends Gillespie's reconstruction of real and imagined narratives and her fascination with transcendence from this mortal coil. Gillespie's works are most effective when her objects, photography and installations resemble the archaeological.

William Mackrell's light works sit comfortably in a tradition pioneered by Robert Irwin, Dan Flavin and James Turrell. Whereas an artist like Turrell seeks to broaden our perception of light, Mackrell is often synthesising or containing it. As a result of this and his highly attuned formal sensibility, Mackrell's works create an intimacy that makes us feel as though we are witness to a private ceremony of light.

While Innovators 3 presents five solo exhibitions, the viewer's mind cannot help but draw parallels between the artists' works. And like all fascinating series, one is always looking forward to the next instalment.

Click to view image/s from this exhibition: