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Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911 and moved to New York in 1938. She continued to live and work in NY until her death in May 2010. For over 60 years, Bourgeois worked across disciplines, producing sculptures, drawings, paintings and prints dealing with personal memory, emotion and the body. ‘Echo' is a suite of seven bronze sculptures, cast from Bourgeois' discarded clothes that have been draped, stretched and sewn together. alternatively slender or slumped with bulbous folds and creases, they represent maternal feelings of nurturing warmth and organic growth.
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Angela Ellsworth Born 1964 in Palo Alto, USA. Angela Ellsworth is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Phoenix, Arizona. Her drawings, paintings, installations and performances explore the body in its various contexts and constraints – the moving and performing body; the body subject to social and religious conventions, as well as to the physical acts of artmaking. Following her initial studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Ellsworth lived for several years in Florence, Italy before returning to the United States to complete an MF A in Painting and Performance Art at Rutgers State University of New Jersey in 1993. Her works of this time were large, figurative canvases that she has moved away from in recent years in her exploration of public art, feminism and performance. Aiming to connect the body with art, and public with private experience, her solo and collaborative artworks and performances have taken in such wide-ranging subjects as physical fitness, endurance, social ritual, religious tradition and performance art history.
Ellsworth’s recent sculptural works have been informed by her own Mormon background, taking the outward appearance of members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints as their point of departure. Ellsworth’s use of corsage pins in her work to emphasise a sharp-ended side to beauty is seen in her recent series of sculptural bonnets. Made of fabric with a pearl-encrusted exterior comprising thousands of pins, the insides of the traditional pioneer headpieces are needle edged and present a painful proposition to the wearer. These bonnets have been shown alongside a series of works where scenes from seminal performance pieces have been embroidered on to paper napkins. Referencing the Mormon practice of polygamy, Ellsworth claims these important figures of performance practice as her ‘sister wives’; in Sister Wife Valie (Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1969) (2008), tiny stitches recreate the 1969 event in which Austrian artist Valie Export brandished a machine gun while wearing crotchless jeans. For the opening of the exhibition in which the aforementioned works were shown, the artist arranged for young women in long pastel dresses to pantomime the scenes depicted on the napkins; one woman shone a torch between her legs in reference to Annie Sprinkle’s 1989 performance Public Cervix Announcement. Together, the suite of works examines art, religion and tradition, colliding old-fashioned domesticity with some of the more radical artworks of the last century.
Installation view of 'Echo' series, 2007 bronze, painted white and steel
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Rosslynd Piggott Born 1958 in Melbourne, Australia Lives and works in Melbourne. She creates exquisite objects, paintings and multimedia installations, often employing skilled crafts practitioners to complement her own mastery of materials, light and shadow.
Shelter (2006–10) occupies one of the oldest houses on Cockatoo Island. In her work Memory Garden (2006-2010), Piggott has responded to the island’s layered history to create a flowing series of spaces and images intended to transform the site’s dark residue of remembered experience. New and mysterious elements are introduced to alter the once domestic rooms, and the viewer’s experience of them: cubes of mirrored glass and black lacquer; footage of the sea; air that gathered under old blossom trees lining the moat of the Tokyo Imperial Palace after a thunderstorm; and photos taken of the damaged door of a general’s office in Tokyo, significant as the site where writer Yukio Mishima put himself to death by seppuku (ritual suicide). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3Dud8bo8p8&feature=player_embedded .JPG)
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Bill Viola Born 1951 in New York, USA. Lives and works in Long Beach, USA. Incarnation (2008), part of ‘Transfigurations’, a suite of videos that explore the idea of metamorphosis as being an essential part of human life were on show at the 17th Biennale of Sydney.
The title of this series ‘refers to a rare process whereby both the substance and essence of an entity is reconfigured’, a ‘transfiguration’ or remodelling of appearance that ‘takes on its fullest meaning in the spiritual context when it refers to the moment when a person or an object is transformed not by external means but from within.’ In Incarnation, a wall of water and light creates a barrier, possibly between the physical and metaphysical worlds; but this is a permeable membrane that not only ‘makes flesh’ of those who penetrate it but also may transform those who experience the work.
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Angela Ellsworth Born 1964 in Palo Alto, USA. Angela Ellsworth is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Phoenix, Arizona. Her drawings, paintings, installations and performances explore the body in its various contexts and constraints – the moving and performing body; the body subject to social and religious conventions, as well as to the physical acts of artmaking. Following her initial studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Ellsworth lived for several years in Florence, Italy before returning to the United States to complete an MF A in Painting and Performance Art at Rutgers State University of New Jersey in 1993. Her works of this time were large, figurative canvases that she has moved away from in recent years in her exploration of public art, feminism and performance. Aiming to connect the body with art, and public with private experience, her solo and collaborative artworks and performances have taken in such wide-ranging subjects as physical fitness, endurance, social ritual, religious tradition and performance art history.
Ellsworth’s recent sculptural works have been informed by her own Mormon background, taking the outward appearance of members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints as their point of departure. Ellsworth’s use of corsage pins in her work to emphasise a sharp-ended side to beauty is seen in her recent series of sculptural bonnets. Made of fabric with a pearl-encrusted exterior comprising thousands of pins, the insides of the traditional pioneer headpieces are needle edged and present a painful proposition to the wearer. These bonnets have been shown alongside a series of works where scenes from seminal performance pieces have been embroidered on to paper napkins. Referencing the Mormon practice of polygamy, Ellsworth claims these important figures of performance practice as her ‘sister wives’; in Sister Wife Valie (Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1969) (2008), tiny stitches recreate the 1969 event in which Austrian artist Valie Export brandished a machine gun while wearing crotchless jeans. For the opening of the exhibition in which the aforementioned works were shown, the artist arranged for young women in long pastel dresses to pantomime the scenes depicted on the napkins; one woman shone a torch between her legs in reference to Annie Sprinkle’s 1989 performance Public Cervix Announcement. Together, the suite of works examines art, religion and tradition, colliding old-fashioned domesticity with some of the more radical artworks of the last century.
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