Philippa Hagon at Minerva, Sydney

“Finger to finger thumb to thumb”

Finger to finger, never to linger, the wind doesn’t blow, it sucks Time is an elastic medium in which the past and present are one

In the circus of contemporary existence, where words are shackled in social stocks, and politicians dance like clowns on a tightrope, primal thoughts surface Thumb to thumb sure come, when will we become one

When socio-politico limitations are placed on what we can and can’t say or do, and catastrophes are both evident and pending primal thinking emerges as a way to share and care.

Everyday common materials, the primary things that make up our world as a meaningful matrix of objects from the global web of interconnected assemblages, are brought forward into play. The aura, vitality, and historicity embedded within mundane materials are used as a productive resistance against a civilization of excessive industrialised production-consumption-rejection cycles and as a metaphor for the value/less and worth/less of the subjective self and less visible others.

All kinds of cast-offs, abandoned desire, waste considered useless are ‘saved’, sieved, and brought back into circulation through the flux and flow of the studio habitat in a raw and unfolding process. Transformations and interventions are made with intuition and thought in search for the surprise, failure, and magic. Assembled anti-monumental semi-figurative structures and primal abstract forms/shapes date back to the Neolithic period, Dada, Arte Povera, and Process Art. From the ordinary, the discarded and unloved, the utilitarian and manufactured, a poetry of equivalences and reciprocities emerges.

PH