Rubblework

In the exhibition, Grounded, three artists addressed the local Brunswick urban environment through contemporary art as the 'ground' or site of the material inscription of geological, social and historical transactions. An artist's canvas or ground is receptive - a site for receiving material inscription. Similarly, the ground we populate in our everyday lives is marked and mapped by our actions and is a receptacle for the objects of our transactions. Fleur Summers is interested in the forms that result when ruptures occur in natural and built environments. She is inspired by geological formations, the sublime arctic paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and building sites in which the earth is revealed or where concrete and bitumen surfaces are fractured and assembled in large mounds. This continual remaking and remarking of the ground has become a regular contemporary 'event' in our constructed environment. In response to economic growth, large piles of detritus accumulate in our streets, as the earth is constantly overturned. The once planar surfaces of the sub/urban ground are released to reveal multifaceted interiors of stone, dirt and building rubble. This quotidian materiality is translated through the work to reveal a multifaceted surface that can be felt by the eyes of the viewer and a mass that asserts its centrality in the encounter in the gallery. This work explores the potential of geological understandings to rethink connections between the materiality of physical and social systems. Particular attention will be focused on understandings of matter and processes of formation in the suburban landscape alongside social and economic factors. This artwork draws particularly on the materialist philosophy of Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. This work is unique in form but parallels can be seen in the work of Open Spatial Workshop, Olafur Eliason and Urs Fischer.