Approaching Alta Forma

Approaching Alta Forma is a little like entering an unknown building on the way to a job interview. Off a main tentacle of one of Melbourne’s CBD access roads, and into an unassuming corporate building. Up a few stairs, through a door, through another, over a courtyard, through a final door and with an exhale, entry into a sanctuary of divergent thinking.

The first encounter I have on entering the current exhibition, Wall Arms & Table Legs, curated by Meredith Turnbull and Manon van Kouswijk, is Belle Bassin’s large graphite-on-paper drawing.  Heartform (2023) faces me from an A-frame display leaning on nestled side tables on the floor. The drawing is delicate, pencilly, whimsical. Reminding me of youthful drawings of hearts repeated as patterns, here made solid through prismic gradient experiments within its outline. Read in the margins, meandering patterns offer a vibrating and rhythmic abstraction for the heart prism to sit on. Both foreground and background pulsing with matched energies. Immediately the sincerity of the drawing pulls me in. Hilma af Klimt whispers to me through the symbolism in the work. Feelings and dreams, key to Bassin’s drawings, stir sympathetic associations in me.

Seen just beyond Heartform pinned to a dividing wall, simultaneously as drawing and frame, pulling my vision into the room, is a group of delicate three-dimensional linear pieces made from strings of glass seed beads. The miniature staccato of the lines, each work blocked sections of bright monochromes, black or white, sits out from the wall, tenderly pinned to offer the tension of fluid suspension in tandem with their shadow-trace behind. These neck/wall pieces, Beads for Buildings and Bodies (2023) by Manon van Kouswijk, drape/frame across the plane and as my eye follows the dividing wall to its beginnings. I observe another generous selection of such works, punctuating space, hovering between floor and ceiling: both window and picture frame, drapery and pearls.

The delicacy of these lines matches the intensities of Bassin’s drawing. The caviar-like progress of their passage draws me close, to examine their structures. But in order to ‘take them all in’ I must retreat, stand back, adjust my vision and accept them as drawings. This retreat offers me a refreshed view of the room.

I turn and enter the space behind the partition wall encountering, Evocations (2023) a wall drawing by Meredith Turnbull. Sensitive, sinewy, awash with watercolour jewel colours, the drawing climbs the wall, studded along certain territories with small metal characters; notations, jewels. The little forms are held off the wall on pins and their delicacy, like a drawn line each the size of a small coin, permits them to flutter a little as my moving body stirs the air.

Again, I am drawn close in examination and to retreat, in order to see the whole. This repeated mechanism, approach and withdrawal, has become a methodology for my consumption of the exhibition. Like breath I move in and out.

Breath is present as I encounter the delicate porcelain works of Minhi Park. These works are positioned on a table in front of a large plate glass window. Tender walls of porcelain and stoneware appear freshly squashed from between fingers (A Wall of people (Saram byeong pung) 2x2, 3x3, 4x2, 2023). The artist’s physiognomy present in the structures and in the scale and breath continued from thought to function. Each form illuminated from within by daylight from the window behind. The domestic architectural nature of the objects evoking lanterns, boxes, sharing light from outside with views of the neighbouring apartment blocks. Cocooned within Alta Forma, I make connections between Park’s miniature exploration of rooms and with my inherent knowledge of domestic spaces associated with city living; the outside/inside double life of social beings. The rooms and spaces to which we retreat, both embodied and constructed, when we return home.

Converging in this part of the gallery are more drawings by Bassin as well as a shift in scale as I come upon pieces by Allona Goren. Honed from mouldings and pipes that are rich in associations of domestic construction. In Mouldings, 2023, slivers of skirting boards suspended on silk cord flash their fluted profiles at me. Pipe dreams, 2023, plastic pipes bare their branding and coding like tattoos on skin, and are strung in slices on cord, like pasta on threads, in discordant, undulating composition. A neckpiece in Goren’s hands, with an extended length of 2040cm, or the height of a doorway. From these objects thoughts about my own home flicker to thoughts of skip bins and construction waste. To the endless pursuit of residential one-upmanship that plagues Australian consciousness fed by The Block and its companion TV shows. Goren reimagines such emphasis by turning its materials into objects where the infrastructural becomes the ornamental.

Suddenly the logic of all of the works, bodies and houses, Wall Arms and Table Legs, crystallises for me. Home of sorts is behind social faces. A thread of commonality that can unite. A retreat that permits the shedding of social armour and the donning of ornaments of interiority. All of the artists in the exhibition, chosen by curators Turnbull and van Kouswijk, interact with enquiry into the tensions between one’s body and one’s home. Abstraction, patterning and costume converge interdependently. Examination reveals the tender and individual associations that each artist respectively identifies with these spaces; all these intimacies resonate.

Anna Varendorff
Anna Varendorff is an artist, designer and writer in the fields of art, craft and design. She holds an MFA from Monash University and practices in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia.