PAMELA
KOUWENHOVEN - ARTIST STATEMENT
Kouwenhoven's conceptual artwork exists at the border-lands
between sculptural assemblage and two-dimensional work. 'speaking
back' to those Indigenous works comprising aerial views of this
brown, massively eroded 'country' and often fire-blackened country.
It reminds us that the earth has a skin, a membrane."
For more than twenty years my art practice has grown out of unconventional
materials, the detritus of human scapes street and land.
The works in this exhibition are constructed of worn malthoid,
the bituminous waterproofing membrane pressed into use beneath
corrugated iron water tanks, the icons in Australian landscape.
I go in search of rusting abandoned tanks, scour the malthoid
from their base, reconfigure and reconstruct other surfaces,
other scapes. Scars appear as I scrape at the old malthoid, its
tar-based darkness already marked by servitude in the driest
state in the driest continent. The responsiveness of the
material; the prescience in the imagery unearthed by its de-composition,
has long held me in thrall. The old tanks too, slowly eroding,
crumbling with age; their colours rust rich, soft faded grey
tones of the earth. The 'spirit' of the land firmly embedded
in their remnants.
My work focuses on environmental issues, the changing global
landscape of the 21st century a landscape scarified by
our plundering of the earth, our cities and freeways, the fault-lines
of rampant consumerism: all encapsulated in the metaphor of the
malthoid.
'Speaking Through Hands' Christine Nicholls, WORLD SCULPTURE
NEWS, vol 15, no 4 Autumn 2009 |
