Belle Bassin
Tags: affordable art, art, art club, artbox, artist, Belle bassin, commission, contemporary, melbourne, performance
The following is the letter written by Belle which accompanied the artwork sent to our members as part of her commission for the Art Club.
Some copies of the work may still be available in our online stock room, however at full price! Join the club now to receive monthly commissions at our members flat rate.
Dear Art Club member,
This work is made of a lot of pieces.
It is titled I can eat glass, and showed as a temporary public performance in the gardens of the Heide Museum of Modern Art. It is an esoteric social sculpture; meaning the imagery has come from psychic visions, and when the work stands as a completed sculpture it references the interconnectedness of all living beings. Particularly in the way it moves between a static sculpture of clashing colours and patterns to being a singular bodily apparatus, something that straps and drapes into and over the body.
The work is like a shuffling sculpture, somewhere between dance performance and moving geometric shapes. When choreographing this work I was most focused on the intersections of visual planes. Using a methodology similar to the way you might construct a collage, aligning certain shapes and forms next to each other and disconnecting others.
Early in its making I started seeing this pattern of interconnected placard shapes with curved edges, after sketching it out a few times, I decided to make a paper cut of the shapes, this ended up acting as a 1 - 10 architectural model of the sculptural part of the work. I used them to play with forms the sculptures could make and start modelling some choreography. I have kept this scale for the Art Box commission.
Eventually I jig-sawed the shapes out of wood, digitally collaged my drawings, paintings and collages together and had them printed onto fabric. The fabric was stretched across the jig-sawed frames and tied to the sides of dancers.
Here you have a print of the visual information in the sculpture at a 1-10 scale. It has been cut out so you can arrange it on your desk or you can unfurl it and put it in a frame. You can also print a backdrop for it, a link to which will come through shortly via email. I hope that this work, will find its appropriate format within your home, it is flexible and free.
Belle Bassin, May 2016.
'I can eat glass'
Japanese pigment inks on 310gsm archival cotton rag
Edition of 60 for the Art Club
Dimensions variable (print size 24 cm x 24 cm or 49 cm x 12 cm)
Belle Bassin, 2016