Accretions

Art Collective WA

November 1 - 30

Artist Statement

This exhibition presents an expanded body of work intersecting sculpture, painting, glass, and video.

Newly commissioned glass works will be presented for the first time alongside new textiles, raw canvas painting and works on paper. Reflecting an interest in geological material agency, the alchemic transformations of glass resonates uncannily with my painting processes . The extreme heat and gravity in casting glass resonate with the self organising processes in my painting. Where one single misstep in the mixing or the melting or the cooling processes of the pigments and silica can result in colour and texture shifts , the selected pigments in my paint coalesce and take their own pathway. Raw canvas buckles with the pour of wet paint and natural pigments and map their own course, negotiating the tensions of an uneven surface before settling into the valleys and contours.  

The indeterminacy of things, of matter itself is central to this body of work where the body is held suspended in the moment of making in the studio. It is then that I face the stranger within, the encounter with matter unsettles the illusion of separateness, making palpable the intra-active forces through which matter, memory, and subjectivity co-constitute one another. I think about the duality of glass, inherently fragile alongside its remarkable strength. Selected glass pieces in the exhibition are casts taken from my geologist father’s archives.  The geologist pic, once a robust steel functional instrument  takes on a new meaning through the inherent instability of its form leaving its ghostly trace. Silica sand, a key component in glass, a particulate with a deep cultural history highlighting the interconnectedness of geology and ancient industry. Sand, calcium carbonate and earth pigments are reconstituted in other works in the show alongside textile remnants of previous work .

Choosing a methodology of self organising material process, the space between self and other are not fixed but continually reconfigured through the way things emerge and intra-act. Nothing exists in isolation. Stratigraphic thinking is made material in my work: strata press against one another, sediments fold, faults rupture, and time refuses to remain linear. In these works, the stranger is not external but emerges as an echo within matter itself, an intra-active presence where memory, material, and self erode, compress, and crystallise together, reinforcing a feminist epistemology which proposes new ways of thinking about human and more than human relationality.

Penny Coss 2025