Interstice / GALLLERY ONE

Lucy Chetcuti, Nyx Mathews and Sophie Quinn

21 Jan - 7 Feb 2021

Small feeling 4, 2020, watercolour and plaster on paper, 10 x 9.5 cm. Image Bec Selleck

Interstice 

/ɪnˈtəːstɪs/

noun

a : a space that intervenes between things especially : one between closely spaced things 

// interstices of a wall

b : a gap or break in something generally continuous 

// the interstices of society

How often do we live in the interstices? Experientially, it is frequently the gap which is prolonged, while the final point of connection seems momentary. 2020 was a year of interstices. A definitive break in the continuum. A year of a thousand tiny, unbreachable moments between things held achingly close.

Spaces, breaks, gaps; conversely, intense proximity, hyper-connectivity, claustrophobia. To explore this unsteady terrain requires a broad palette of materials. The mundane, discarded, overlooked or ubiquitous. Things of both minimal and maximal traditional value, suspended in delicate tension. The relentlessly physical demands of tactile media, at once balm and lead weight for artists adrift in a digital year. 

Through diverse and iterative explorations, Lucy Chetcuti, Nyx Mathews and Sophie Quinn trace this complex web of connections: humans and objects, humans and environments, humans and each other. Through this lens, the works in Interstice pose questions regarding hierarchies and modes of value, space and connection. How does the line attach or divide us? How do positioning and scale affect considerations of relationality between art objects and the human-made environments which house them? Where is the border between comforting enclosure and constraint?

At the beginning of a year which seems, by turns, as fragile and as vital, as precarious, hopeful and unsettling as many of the works in this exhibition, these questions press upon us.