" That's Just Rubbish " Lot 19 Gallery, Castlemaine., 6 - 27 May 2024
Artist Statement
"That’s Just Rubbish" is a sculpture exhibition by Candy Stevens and Catherine Shields exhibiting at Lot 19 in May 2024. These artists use plastic packaging as a medium to consider over-production and over-consumption within capitalist societies and to highlight the environmental hazards and flaws. As a medium, soft food packaging in particular is drawn upon to explore feminist ideas surrounding domesticity, the impact of womens' return to work as well as the commodification or 'packaging' of women's bodies.
Multidisciplinary artist Catherine Shields uses a variety of mediums and techniques to re-purpose found materials such as soft single use plastic, tin, fabric, hair and grasses to twist, sew and enmesh into new forms. Titles such as Entanglement, Enmeshed, Mother Lode, and Empty Nester suggest relations with others, including objects, the Earth, our bodies. "We are enmeshed in the cycle of materials and their affects on the planet.
Remnants of past receptacles of food, litter our bodies and the land we live with".
Catherine continues to be passionate about the role of re-purposing and ‘making-do’ to speak about the complexity of of personal responsibility to the earth and to ourselves.
Sculptor, painter and installation artist Candy Stevens is also bent on recycling materials in her practice. Candy thinks that there is enough 'stuff' on the planet and so reinvigorates new from old. This at times extends to recycling her sculptures into new works. In the tradition of Arte Povera, creating works from everyday and discarded objects, her practice disregards power constructs and financial norms and becomes a meditation on the temporal and ephemeral nature of existence. For this exhibition Candy will present freestanding, suspended and sculptures on plinths in the main Gallery while the Annex Gallery will feature an installation called “Women’s Liberation”. This work consists of six life-size female heads constructed from soft plastics, The figures circle around and gaze upon a central transparent bag of soft plastic 'rubbish' Some of the heads are spotlit and others illuminate from within.
Multidisciplinary artist Catherine Shields uses a variety of mediums and techniques to re-purpose found materials such as soft single use plastic, tin, fabric, hair and grasses to twist, sew and enmesh into new forms. Titles such as Entanglement, Enmeshed, Mother Lode, and Empty Nester suggest relations with others, including objects, the Earth, our bodies. "We are enmeshed in the cycle of materials and their affects on the planet.
Remnants of past receptacles of food, litter our bodies and the land we live with".
Catherine continues to be passionate about the role of re-purposing and ‘making-do’ to speak about the complexity of of personal responsibility to the earth and to ourselves.
Sculptor, painter and installation artist Candy Stevens is also bent on recycling materials in her practice. Candy thinks that there is enough 'stuff' on the planet and so reinvigorates new from old. This at times extends to recycling her sculptures into new works. In the tradition of Arte Povera, creating works from everyday and discarded objects, her practice disregards power constructs and financial norms and becomes a meditation on the temporal and ephemeral nature of existence. For this exhibition Candy will present freestanding, suspended and sculptures on plinths in the main Gallery while the Annex Gallery will feature an installation called “Women’s Liberation”. This work consists of six life-size female heads constructed from soft plastics, The figures circle around and gaze upon a central transparent bag of soft plastic 'rubbish' Some of the heads are spotlit and others illuminate from within.