Op Shop, Maitland Regional Art Gallery, Maitland, Australia 2015
Fiona Davies, Memorial/ Hanky 2004-2005, fabric and found objects, 600 x 600 x 300cm
The Opportunity Shop Artists by Fiona Davies
The two stone garlanded sculptures, Yaksha and Yakshi, rotate as if walking to and fro, meditating, but looking a bit anxious as if trying to solve a riddle. Normally located on either side of the entrance to the Reserve Bank of India and considered the guardians of natural treasure, the statues are now floating as if by magic in a complicated choreography against a grimy polluted riverside backdrop. This is the video Sleepwalker’s Caravan by the New Delhi based Raqs Media Collective.
There is also an unexpected or magical element in our experience of op shops. We can find treasure even without the aid of a map. Margot Riley shows clearly the more active side of the magic of this experience in her catalogue essay outlining the frenzy of shopping in the first op shop in Sydney.
Multiple references to India are layered into Louise Saxton’s work Weep. She says ‘Many pieces in the tree are from an Indian bedspread and my first ever acquisition of needlework was from an emporium in “Bombay” when I visited in 1988. The form of Weep is also based on a tree-of-life window carving in a 16th Century mosque in northern Indian.’ These elements were then overlaid with additional reclaimed needlework often acquired from op shops. Needlework that is valuable and not seen as rubbish.
Seen clearly as rubbish however, are the materials of Sarah Goffman’s practice. Here the most basic stuff of our over consumption, flimsy take away food containers, ironically form a solid base. Sarah uses a painterly intervention with the aesthetics of Japanese traditional forms of representation rubbing up against contemporary western industrial design to mutate these items of rubbish into the magical.
For Nicole Barakat the role of materials is paramount – she needs those with strong stories as witnesses to previous lives brought to this encounter, layered with the visible and invisible stains and marks enabling them to transcend the everyday. They allow our intimate relationship with objects such as tea towels, pillowcases and tablecloths to be the means by which we dream and make a new reality. These materials of Nicole Barakat’s reality are often valuable objects from op shops.
Often the more valuable objects sold in op shops are wrapped in newspaper for safekeeping. Cath Bowen, photographer from the Maitland Mercury, has pulled images from the day-to-day business of the Maitland op shops away from the ephemeral nature of the newspaper wrapping, to document and hold still images of people and place.
As well as wrapping, the daily duties of the op shop worker include sorting and folding. Surabhi Saraf in her video focuses on the meditative nature of the ritual of folding and refolding clothes. This video documents public performances of group synchronised folding; the choreography of the performers which together with the sounds made by the clothes as they are pulled right way out allows us to focus solely on the garments between the performers’ hands. We become aware of the possible beauty, joy and sacredness of chores we all undertake every day.
Fiona Hall’s work also uses material that can be located both a valuable and as rubbish. Tupperware is fiercely defended by its supporters while others question its role in group selling parties primarily for women. In this work Tupperware-shrouded lights flash in Morse code spelling out the first sentence from chapter 21 of Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens ‘I have the misfortune of not being a fool’.
David Sequeira , Donna Marcus and Maeve Woods all exploit the abundance of certain types of goods in op shops to disrupt our expectations of how these objects should behave. Maeve Woods’ work uses multiple wooden bowls, mass produced to serve the increase in less formal entertaining during the 1960s to 1980s. Everyday these bowls were seen stacked in the cupboard, partially hidden filled with food, or as something painful that needed to be cleaned and put away. Maeve’s work draws our attention to what happens when we look these bowls in the eye, a straight-on look. We finally see the nature of the forms of the bowls, the sensuous interior shapes and their agility when sliced and rearranged to disrupt our reading of these every day, almost disposable objects.
The abundance of objects in David Sequeira’s works results in glorious fun-filled patterning that speaks to a fine process of sorting. One of his techniques is to seek out objects to in a spectrum of colours. In Collections 1 & 2 No 12 our mind seeks to re-sort, to improve the artwork by pulling the colourful vases into the order of a rainbow spectrum of colours rather than accept his disrupted spectrum as normal. Donna Marcus on the other hand works with the restricted colour palette of everyday aluminium cookware, telling a story of the domestic in a disrupted geometry. In both Marcus and Sequeira’s work, the abundance of objects foregrounds the quantity of goods passing through the op shop cycle of use and reuse before being pulled out and allocated a role as a valuable art object.
Small soft toys, outgrown, lost or forgotten, markers of the loss of innocence of childhood form the basis of Luke Roberts’ major work. For Roberts the idea of the ‘wondercabinet’ is a way of looking with awareness, excitement and curiosity that will expand to include the whole world. For the duration of this exhibition the entire Maitland Regional Gallery could be considered to be part of the wondercabinet , part of the collective memory sparked by the soft toys.
In Kiri Morcombe’s work the layers of screens of doilies placed between the projector and the screen provide a means of embedding pattern, narrative and colour onto the flickering images of the Busby Berkley dancers. This disruption of the images allows us to re-see both the doilies and the dancers with new eyes open to the magic of the unexpected combination.
Finally my work has two components; the first is a work based on interviews and examination of the ten op shops in Maitland and local areas. I have tried to control my own voice to allow the words, gestures and impact on the world of the people and places represented by the Maitland area op shops to be unmediated. The second is my work based on a long history of acquiring art material from op shops. Over this process, lots of people have helped me; my mother before her death was the major collector of the white buttons used in the Ice work. The collective nature of acquiring materials that contain the marks of previous lives is a pivotal component of my practice.
Op shopping can be thought of as the antithesis of shopping over the internet. While the range of goods is staggering, it is not possible in an op shop to ask ‘I like that but does it come in pink’? No it doesn’t, unless you are willing to turn it pink yourself.