Brooke Georgia - Sep 25'
1. Can you talk about the central idea behind the installation for aught?
Aught is a word that can mean anything or nothing, often used in reference to what is known. Void and speaking to what isn’t there has always been a part of my work. Not as a decision made but as something that arises from doing the work. The transparent fabric piece is an idea I had over twenty years ago, and in some way I’ve always been looking for the right space/room for it.
These days I usually work from responding to found materials, so it has been enjoyable to work from the idea first.
2. I associate the term ‘world building’ with you, in reference to building an art practice, and find it comforting as I’ve taken it to mean allowing a slow steady pace to finding your voice. Is that what you mean when you say this? What has that looked like for you over the years?
For me ‘world building’ was enabled by having quite a private practice for a long time. It’s something that happens from interacting with a lot of materials and taking the time to let what the work has to say emerge. Often what thought I was doing wasn’t what stayed over time. It’s a very interior practice and responsibility to being curious about all sides of yourself and how things are balanced. It is to be very human and to be as honest as you can about that, even if that feels a little annihilating. Because then all those things have a place it your ‘world’ and your making is broader and more resonant for it.
3. You have been casting concrete and ash into items of clothing for a while and have some new pieces in this show which balance well with the lightness of some other pieces. What does adding the ash give to the concrete when casting? And what does it mean to you to continue to return to this technique?
When I first began casting into clothing the ash was an important material, symbolically about grief and transformation. I’ve often worked in series like this where the total of the fragments adds up to a larger whole. The unfinished little spaces the concrete finds in the fabric are like a pocket of time, a weighted remnant. The clothing goes around the body, the concrete casts into the space where a body could or should be. The ash is less important now, I add thread remnants from my studio floor instead. Continuing to make them is about playing with form, weight, action and time: an inversion of the void.
4. You’ve spoken about making work that feels open or a little unfinalized, how do you know where that point is?
I was listening to British artist Hew Locke talk about “the meticulously unfinished” the other day, and how difficult it can be to finish a piece. In the end I think it’s a feeling, a personal preference. But leaving things unfinished, or a bit raw is really important to me, it leaves room for something I’m not entirely in control of. It’s not too enclosed.
5. When you are sourcing materials for being, is there anything that is becoming harder to find, given the change in fashion production/consumption over the last decade/s?
Natural materials are a little harder to find, and also of course vintage clothes from before polyester was invented. Sometimes lately I stand in an op shop and think, ‘this is a room full of plastic’. But there is still a bit of wool around which I really hope we don’t lose, for the entire industry’s sake. Wool is an amazingly enduring and flexible material.
6. Where do hope and renewal live for you at the moment?
A little of my hope comes from the evidence of my own practice, that what I thought I was doing wasn’t what stayed over time. Maybe what some of our politicians think they are doing may not give the results they expect over time.
In the face of the evidence of awful suffering and death right now, I make work that wants to touch another’s humanity.
When all else fails I think of the vastness of the universe and the awe in the potential of absolute nothing, and the quirk in scale and time that means our smallest actions to each other matter. Like the entanglement of quantum state particles, a particle affected in this room can simultaneously affect a particle on the other side of the galaxy.
Thanks Brooke xx
