The Silverings

<p dir="ltr">Research Background </p><p dir="ltr">The Silverings investigates materiality, mirroring, doubling, levitation, and intergenerational artistic inheritance through two vast floating installations composed of Mylar sheets and helium-filled silver balloons. This ephemeral work—made, configured, and destroyed with each iteration—explores the sculptural potential of gas as medium, challenging conventions of permanence and weight in three-dimensional sculptural practice. The research draws upon multiple historical precedents: Andy Warhol's reflective Factory environments, 1960s space-age design aesthetics, and crucially, the modernist jewellery practice of the artist's mother, Dorothy Dwyer, who worked primarily in sterling silver. The work's tethering at predetermined points negotiates a relation to grounding through objects such as a bucket full of books, blocks of clay, bottles of water and at another corner a floating plant. The sculpture’s buoyant autonomy is positioned between flight and anchorage to the ground plane. </p><p dir="ltr">Research Significance </p><p dir="ltr">This research contributes to expanded definitions of sculpture by animating relationships between the visible and invisible, gas and solids, volume, buoyancy, gravity and movement. Dwyer's articulation of creating "a nothing sculpture comprising gas" advances discourse on how artists transform quotidian materials through contextual and conceptual reframing. The work's significance lies in its interrogation of alchemical transformation—the "magic act" where helium becomes perceptible as material possessing both mass and levitation. The matrilineal dimension contributes to feminist art discourse, demonstrating how inherited craft traditions (jewellery-making) can inform contemporary installation practice. The Silverings create productive tension between minimalism and maximalism while operating as a negative space akin to the vessel, void, vowel, and zero—a proliferation of symbolic readings that challenge reductive interpretation. The work's ephemerality contributes to discourse on dematerialization and the artwork as temporal event. </p><p dir="ltr">Research Contribution </p><p dir="ltr">The silvering contributes methodologically by modeling approaches to installation that embrace instability and reconfiguration rather than fixed form. The work's destruction after each presentation challenges commercial art economies predicated on object permanence, contributing to alternative value systems centred on experience and regeneration. By foregrounding helium's dual properties—mass and weightlessness—the research expands phenomenological engagement with invisible materials, demonstrating how sculpture can manifest atmospheric conditions. The intergenerational framework contributes innovative approaches to artistic lineage, positioning maternal influence as foundational rather than supplementary. The relationship between The Silvering and previous work based on my mother Dorothy Dwyer’s rings (Hollowwork (ringing) models how artists can create internal dialogues within exhibitions, using formal restraint and material abundance as complementary rather than oppositional strategies. The work validates biography and personal symbolism as rigorous research methodologies, demonstrating how family history, craft traditions, and alternate logics can generate complex spatial and conceptual investigations within contemporary art practice.</p>