Book Works were a series of sculptures made from books and other recycled materials. They were exhibited from Monday May 23 – Sunday June 5, 2016 in display cases in the foyer of the Hawthorn Arts Centre (on behalf of the Town Hall Gallery).
The exhibition was an adjunct to Swinburne University’s celebrations of Book Week. Jodie Goldring gave an Artist Talk at 11am on Tuesday May 24th at Swinburne University in Hawthorn.
Well-known poet Dominique Hecq read poems written in response to the sculptures at 3.30pm on the Tuesday alongside the exhibition in the foyer of the Hawthorn Arts Centre.
Interview with Jodie Goldring by SenajAlijevski Other Terrain Journal ARTICLE
Book Houses
Three Book Houses were made for this exhibition. Since making a tree change to the Central Highlands of Victoria in 2012 I have been exploring the concept to “inhabit”. Simple naïve house forms are a quick and easy way to do this and born out of my work making art with primary aged children. With Book Houses I have enjoyed playing with altering pages of books and found that shellac painted onto pages dissolved the ink, which created lovely colouration.
Book House 3, recycled cereal box, recycled book, acrylic paint and PVA glue, 23cm wide x 27cm high x 15cm deep, 2016, $280
Book house
A single detached house tossed
out of suburbia settles
across dreams.
Skin paper thin desiccated and scripted
like a conversational collage covers the walls, the absence
of doors, thresholds, verandahs, stairways, footpaths,
windows,louvres,blinds—all.
This is a house paranoically sealed
with sky art and earth art shellac washed
and rolled into each other on adjacent surfaces.
The roof, unlettered, is made of two sliding sun-
screened panels foundation-like.
Round the back is a rope
ladder that wins you over.
Up and up you go. Enter
with care as you would a fiction.
Welcome to the jungle of the real.
Dominique Hecq
Books with Cordyceps
Three Books with Cordyceps were on loan from private collectors for this exhibition. Cordyceps are unusual fungi that invade insects and cause their premature death; their nature is predatory. Whilst consuming and killing their healthy host they grow into weirdly beautiful fruiting forms before exuding a mass of spores that await the next insect to invade and transform. In these works I used cordyceps as a metaphor to illustrate the infection and subsequent mutation of ideas where beautiful and grotesque meaning emerges. The viewer is able to open the book to see the result!
Book with Cordyceps 3 (Gone Rambling), 2015, recycled book, watercolour paper, plastic pool toys copper wire and polyester yarn, 20cm wide x 22cm high x 14cm deep, NFS
Approaching cordyceps
Mountains don’t have feet
yet they run across
the sky red from lands of no return
you bend time
pretending your zombie
mushrooms will bear fruit
where all life grows
underground
infiltrates the bodies
of bookworms sexing artful
lies penned like hymns
in the wake of ghost moths.
Gone rambling
This one’s a conundrum
A Zizekian aporias
A boustrophedon in 3D
crying out for a woman’s touch
toucher tocar kosbea
A mathematical Question
Equation
The structure of an ARK
y
touch
Wordsworth
Touch and go
This is madness all coiled up all stuck all
gone rambling with idol hands post
ROMANtickCAPitalismCONsumerismCORPor@ISM
Time to reconstruct the dictionary files
the database organisations
the codes and labels and headwords
Dominique Hecq
Jodie Goldring 