SLICE: Greer Taylor at Project, Wollongong.

The work blood will use the 800 metres of red plastic tube individually threaded and tensioned from ceiling to wall to floor and back again, signifying the body’s circulatory system.

SLICE: an Art Event in the Making
Artist Greer Taylor
Project Contemporary Art Space, Wollongong, NSW, Australia

Artist Greer Taylor’s close relationship to plastic tube is crucial to her solo show SLICE, which will run to 26 April at Project Contemporary Artspace in Wollongong. Taylor will not only stretch 800 metres of red tube from wall to ceiling to create her pivotal work blood, (referring to the body’s circulatory system), but she will also bundle the material into a tiny perspex box for another work alluding to waste management.

SLICE promises many things, the least being sensible artworks in frames and glass cabinets. For one thing, when you enter the gallery expect to be struck by the smell. Taylor’s pieces leaf sling will be giving off the organic stench of rotting vegetation, as one of the many pieces exploring notions of life in process and art in the making.

“I want people to smell the art, to experience it with all their senses, to engage with it,” Taylor says.
Taylor has chosen SLICE as the show’s title, to refer to the repeated elements involved, and also to suggest making an incision to reveal that which is not usually seen by the naked eye. SLICE will also invite the viewer to dissect Taylor’s own process of artmaking, by offering her presence on site. In other words, throughout the show, Taylor will be in situ, working and re-working a range of found objects, sculptures and installations. Paintings will be ritualistically replaced. SLICE offers works in flux: each day is a homage to change, with one day’s works differing from the last.

Says Taylor: “I am interested in ephemera, in art that evolves over time, just as elements of nature evolve. I want to produce works that once developed to their so-called final state, might disintegrate before the exhibition ends. It is not about selling a finished art product, what I am aiming at here is staging an exhibition in the making.”

Taylor comments on the planet’s ecology in her choice of disparate materials, many of which evoke ideas of  recycling and reducing waste. Perspex boxes in the gallery will fill with the waste she generates throughout the event working both as mini-waste compactors and art pieces. One work is a perspex box titled, string theory – cube, offering 50 metres of plastic tubing stretched across its inside posing an ecological riddle she grapples with.

“I often collect material from nature – especially sticks, but while one part of me wants to use nothing that is not directly from the natural world, I can’t resist the possibilities offered by industrial products.”
“I have an interest in simple, elemental ‘unimproved’ human-made products – a sheet of metal, plastic tubing, steel rope, thread – products that are often overlooked in terms of art creation. They sit on a shelf, loaded with potential and seem to call to be evolved into something else.”
Some of her favourite materials, speaking to her of primary usage like: nuts, bolts and turnbuckles. With a background as a successful textile artist (The Decade Parade – Dressed to Kill exhibition, Australian National Gallery, Canberra and Harlequin: World Expo 1992, Seville, Spain) common sewing thread often winds up in her art pieces.

Statistician Professor David Griffiths, as Foundation Professor of Statistics, the University of Wollongong will speak at the opening on Friday April 24, which Taylor acknowledges will be more like a summation of all that has evolved in the past 10 days within the confines of Project Contemporary Artspace.

opening: 7pm Friday 24 April
guest speaker: David Griffiths, Foundation Professor of Statistics, University of Wollongong
Project Contemporary Artspace
255 Keira St, Wollongong
info@projectgallery.org
www.projectgallery.org
Gallery opening hours: Wed – Fri, 12-6pm
Sat – Sun, 11-4pm