Donna Huddleston
10 Sep - 22 Oct 2011
DONNA HUDDLESTON
Smoke Garden
10 September - 22 October, 2011
‘Smoke Garden’ is the second solo exhibition by Donna Huddleston (1970, AU) at Galerie Juliette Jongma. Like ‘Summer House’, her 2006 installation, ‘Smoke Garden’ is again a theatrical space: a space for gestures, made from gestures. The artist combines different media –drawing, sculpture, fabric design – in all-over installations, which, their minutely crafted details notwithstanding, retain the sketch-like, vivid feel of a proposal.
Huddleston’s universe is all about ritual and gesture, and eclectically echoes the serpentine vocabulary of fin-de-siècle poster design, 1920s fashion illustration, as well as William Morris’s Arts & Crafts-aesthetics. The artist emphatically employs an integrated arts practice, in which elements of graphic and stage design, performance, drawing, and sculpture are to be understood as equal parts of a greater whole.
‘Smoke Garden’ is the title of a suggested performance: a fifteen minute chamber piece to be performed on the percussion instrument The Triangle. It is performed by seven women, and it is staged around a lamppost. The installation in the gallery provides a proposed environment for this performative act, and offers a familiar setting: dashingly elegant female characters in precisely executed colour drawings that are combined with prop-like sculptural elements. The seven women of ‘Smoke Garden’ are represented in various guises, including drawings, painting, and a bronze doorknocker.
The starting point for the making of this work came from a reading of JG Ballards The Kindness of women, his semi-autobiographical book. Inspired by his life and work the performance is interested in how his “characters construct personal mythologies to sustain their inner lives and experiment with themselves as if they were dreams”.
Smoke Garden
10 September - 22 October, 2011
‘Smoke Garden’ is the second solo exhibition by Donna Huddleston (1970, AU) at Galerie Juliette Jongma. Like ‘Summer House’, her 2006 installation, ‘Smoke Garden’ is again a theatrical space: a space for gestures, made from gestures. The artist combines different media –drawing, sculpture, fabric design – in all-over installations, which, their minutely crafted details notwithstanding, retain the sketch-like, vivid feel of a proposal.
Huddleston’s universe is all about ritual and gesture, and eclectically echoes the serpentine vocabulary of fin-de-siècle poster design, 1920s fashion illustration, as well as William Morris’s Arts & Crafts-aesthetics. The artist emphatically employs an integrated arts practice, in which elements of graphic and stage design, performance, drawing, and sculpture are to be understood as equal parts of a greater whole.
‘Smoke Garden’ is the title of a suggested performance: a fifteen minute chamber piece to be performed on the percussion instrument The Triangle. It is performed by seven women, and it is staged around a lamppost. The installation in the gallery provides a proposed environment for this performative act, and offers a familiar setting: dashingly elegant female characters in precisely executed colour drawings that are combined with prop-like sculptural elements. The seven women of ‘Smoke Garden’ are represented in various guises, including drawings, painting, and a bronze doorknocker.
The starting point for the making of this work came from a reading of JG Ballards The Kindness of women, his semi-autobiographical book. Inspired by his life and work the performance is interested in how his “characters construct personal mythologies to sustain their inner lives and experiment with themselves as if they were dreams”.