Kirstie Rea at work in the studio. photo: kirstie rea
GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet: What are you working on?
Kirstie Rea: At the moment, my work is primarily concerned with capturing a sense of space. Specifically, I’ve been attempting to describe a place through the experience of its space for my recent exhibition “Gudgenby Traces” at Craft ACT: Craft and Design Centre. The exhibition, which just closed in mid-June, was the culmination of my 2009 artist-in-residence project at the Gudgenby Ready-Cut Cottage within the Namadgi National Park.
In 2009, I went to live in a cottage deep in the park, where there was no glass studio. All I took was a drawing book, charcoal, ink, and a diamond scribe, which I used to draw on small bits of window glass. Not only was I drawing with charcoal and ink, I was stippling on glass with the scribe in a traditional technique. I found stippling on the glass such an amazing process to do out there because it forces you to consider form, light, and shadow in new ways. While I was watching wildlife —eagles, dingos, so many kinds of birds, a platypus — by drawing them with the diamond scribe, it inspired me to work on glass, and also to create brush and ink, charcoal drawings.
I also always use my camera, and took it with me every day when I went out walking. I found myself playing more with the lens, trying to capture the special sense of a space. The uniqueness of the landscape, and how it changed depending on the time of day, was amazing. I was using my lens to blur out the imagery, capture the sense of place more from colors than from sharp focus on individual elements.
When I got back into my studio, knowing I had a show coming up at the completion of the residency, I started to create work that captured volume and vacancy, as well as layers. The national park was actually created on land that had formerly been farming country just 30 years earlier, so there are still many remnants of that layer. Also, it is a part of the country with incredible indigenous history, amazing natural rock shelters, and one of the most significant aboriginal art sites in our area of Southeastern Australia. I describe this as “lost lived layers.”
For the exhibition, the work expressed itself for three main works for the gallery. One was called Inside the Gate and I used wool on the wall to delineate very simply the gate, through which I entered the valley and which put me literally in that unique place. But for me, the “place” is more about the visual qualities of an environment while the “space” is more about what is felt. I was interested in the merging of the visual and other senses.
So, at the far end of the gallery was another installation called From the Veranda, which refers to the view that started each morning for me during the residency. In between these two was a long horizon line on one wall, drawn in wool thread, which is called simply Looking West.
In the end, the only glass in the exhibition were the etchings on glass. These were simple glass paintings, very literal, realistic portraits of birds, which you saw on the way into the gallery.
Portraits of birds were made using a diamond-tipped scribe in a technique known as "stippling." photo: steven murray
GLASS: What artwork have you experienced recently that has moved you, and got you thinking about your own work?
Kirstie: When you ask me about influences, one of them is certainly Dia Beacon. I still remember the first time I saw the work of Fred Sandback there alongside all those works by Richard Serra, Donald Judd, and Agnes Martin. But it was looking at Fred Sandback’s work, how minimally he described a form through that single line of wool in work that was architectural in nature that informed my recent work.
After returning to town after the residency, I really started to research and explore how I could represent the space I felt while down in the valley. Whilst I wasn’t lonely out there, there was sense of alone-ness, a perfect place to work and think. I went through a process of drawing on the wall, of trying to trace the daily foraging paths of the scarlet robbins from the top of the fence post. And that I was doing in wool using the wall as the take-off point. And I have to reference the work of Robert Irwin, who comes even before Fred Sanback.
Kirstie Rea, Looking West (detail), 2010. Wool thread.
With Irwin, it was his efforts to have the painting lose its frame, lose its edge, and become the space. Moving on to totally controlled space that the viewer entered, the work is the viewers’ experience of that place. My all-time favorite reading is Lawrence Weschler’s collection of conversations with Irwin Seeing is Forgetting the Name of What One Sees (University of California, 1981). This issue of the edge being the problem is also taken up in glass, as you can see in the work of Marian Karel and Christopher Wilmarth.
GLASS: Do you have any upcoming exhibitions where we might see your work?
Kirstie: My work can be seen in Australia at Sabbia Gallery, but at the moment I actually don’t have any major exhibitions planned in the next 12 months. That’s always a really exciting time for me. Without the pressure of a show I can really explore both materals and ideas. I have another residency in November back in Australia, and I always combine teaching alongside making. I enjoy both parts of being a professional artist, the teaching and the practice, and I find teaching very rewarding. From Jan to May 2011, I’ll be teaching for a semester at the Alberta College of Art and Design.