Naomi Troski: FOSSE. 1 June-26 June 2012
City of Kingston’s new contemporary art gallery, G3 Artspace, presents “Fosse” the new work from sculptor, Naomi Troksi.
While it‘s possibly more accurate to describe her site-responsive 3D works as ‘drawings in space’ than sculpture, as it also indicates her installation methodology.
In 2011 Troski exhibited both “Runnel” in The Substation Contemporary Art Prize exhibition and “Slowhaze” in the Innovators 2 exhibition at the Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts. Troski also exhibited “Gyre” at Melbourne’s highly regarded CBD artist-run gallery, Blindside. In each of these exhibitions, Troski has used the plastic trellis we will see used again in “Fosse” but each time it is marvellously different.
In “Runnel” it floated high up in the ceiling of the Substation gallery and virtually “grew” down into the spaces between the columns.
In “Slowhaze” it resembled a cloud that both hovered centrally and moved across the space it was installed in, enabling one to move around and through it to observe it from different angles.
With “Gyre” the trellis was embedded in an eerie, almost claustrophobic, blue light that one’s eyes had to adjust to before being able to see the work properly – and when you did it was revelatory to see her hazy white form spiralling gently across the white space between several strings – like a soft, floating musical notation running across a page.
Though she is using the same material for “Fosse”, Troski’s site- responsive manipulation of the trellis for each space makes every installation unique. This is not only due to the interior architecture of the space, which impacts on the physical – or phenomenological – experience of each work, but in the way the change of light throughout the day is harnessed to affect our perception of each work.
The title of her upcoming exhibition, “Fosse” is an Old French word that refers to a moat or a ditch cut into the earth for ‘fortification’.
In Old Norse, however, it means waterfall. The artist could, however, combine these meanings to suggest the possibility of a canal or waterway. In the case of “Fosse”, perhaps her work will ‘cut’ and move – or flow – through the interior, and perhaps exterior, space of G3 Artspace. But we have to wait until June to find out!
As an undergraduate student at London’s St Martins College of Art and Design, artist Naomi Troski developed her distinctive oeuvre by focusing on a very specific use of light and space. This has continued refinement through the ongoing process of exhibition alongside the recent completion of her MFA at Monash University (2010). Unlike artists such as James Turrell and Anish Kapoor, who use light and space in a more abstract manner, Troski produces works that utilise and make us highly aware of both by manipulating long, flexible materials like fibreglass poles, polystyrene tubing and plastic trellis into three-dimensional (3D) forms that respond directly to the physical nature of their site (location) as well as its light, harnessing the affect it can have on the perception of her ‘sculptures’ over time.
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