For Simone Slee the perfect sculpture is the sculpture that ‘fails’. These failures come in many guises; sometimes her works are left to the fallibility of humans, cucumbers and rocks. At other times Slee’s sculptures fail by toppling over, as weight and gravity eventually exert their influence. At the heart of these failures is an ongoing interest in the nature and the parameters of sculpture; an investigation that’s being extended in Slee’s exhibition, Rocks and Things Happy to Help at Sarah Scout Presents.
As both an artist and Head of Sculpture and Spatial Practice at the Victorian College of the Arts, Slee’s two-decade exploration into sculpture and performance has revolved upon design, materiality, absurdity, embarrassment, vulnerability and the legacy of modernism. As she discusses in our podcast conversation, her current show ultimately considers the forces needed to produce sculptural forms. The idea of support and ‘helping’ is central to this, as the artist says, “I’m really interested in this idea of helping because of the idea that helping is an act of agency that is enabling of other things.”
Spanning sculpture, video and photography, Rocks and things happy to help also includes a series of new works; sculptural pieces created with stone and glass that were inspired from a glass residency Slee completed earlier this year in Berlin.
Rather than evoking a binary where sculptural forms can either succeed or fail, her practice seeks to provoke new ways of seeing objects and their functions. To explain this tendency within her work Slee coined the term ‘abfunction’, which she describes as “using the wrong things for the right things or, its inverse, using the right things for the wrong reasons.”
This circles back to notions of failure and vulnerability, which the artist sees as not only important to the practice of sculpture, but useful for questioning how society typifies success in very conventional (and often economic) ways.
Throughout the podcast Slee also talks about the trajectory of her practice, from her early days as a landscape architect to creating her first major work. She discusses further the idea of the ‘perfect failure’, the frisson of having private emotions aired in public settings, and what her career has revealed to her about sculpture.
Stay up to date with the Art Guide podcast by subscribing via iTunes or Spotify.
Rocks and things happy to help
Simone Slee
Sarah Scout Presents
17 November – 16 December
65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is an extraordinary account of the unique art of this continent, published alongside a landmark exhibition at the Potter Museum of Art. Necessary and urgent, it tells the story of Indigenous Australian art; a new art history unlike anything we’ve seen. For Jane O’Sullivan, it’s a remarkable and must-read book.
In a new series of illustrated postcards available as a free gift with purchase only at the Art Guide Bookstore, Oslo Davis takes on classic and contemporary art terms and genres and reimagines what they could be referring to.
With so much to choose from, we’ve rounded up the major summer exhibitions in each capital city, open all summer long. Spanning Yayoi Kusama, Magritte, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, and many more.
Ahead of his major retrospective at Jan Murphy Gallery, Ben Quilty spoke with fellow painter Georgia Spain about wrestling with mythology, the contradictions of joy and suffering, and a belief in art as an antidote to an increasingly volatile world.
Past meets present in Leyla Steven’s latest exhibition, now showing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and co-curated by Artspace. The Australian-Balinese artists adopts a collaborative approach to restitution, scrutinising the systems of conservation and documentation we have inherited.
Developed in 2022 by Artback NT as part of Apmere Mparntwe—the Australian Ceramics Triennale— touring exhibition Clay on Country, showing now at New England Regional Art Museum, showcases the diversity of ceramics in the Central Desert.
