Random scrubs: days of darkness

SLOT Window Gallery, Sydney.

15 July – 17 August, 2024

An installation by Constantine Nicholas

SLOT window gallery is an artist run gallery space on the edge of the city of Sydney. As a shopfront retail space it provides a unique space for anyone to view art at any time of the day, 24/7. The space works like an outdoor vitrine, and the window’s reflection of light can present challenges for artists and their work.

For my part SLOT presents a known entity. I’ve had two shows there already, one in 2004 and another in 2006. So familiar I was but I wanted to do more this time than just hang pictures on the wall. I wanted to occupy the space more in its entirety to include the floor and window into my work.

Inspired by elements of lightness and darkness, I’d been thinking about how I would use the space for a good nine months and did countless iterations on paper and in my head. Imagining how these black and white elements would play out. Prior to this I had been doing a lot of abstract drawing, mostly lines on paper, building these up in layers and not trying to formalise an end result. To realise this I started to scrub and smear pigment during the process, blindly, face down, I’d scrub and drag the drawn surface across pastel remnants and paint lying on a table top or the floor.

During this time, I happened upon a new way of working when sanding some backyard garden furniture. In the process allowing me to create art components without looking to consciously modify or finish them. Creating random marks on sets of paper that I would place together later somewhere, somehow, became more interesting and more liberating for me. I knew now that I needed to incorporate these works and the physical source of the pigment, the garden chairs, into the SLOT installation. I wanted to show both the source and the creation as one.

Six months in and I am diagnosed with rare bone marrow disease and this disrupts my flow of work, my entire outlook on life. As treatment showed promising signs of improvement, I started to lean into this more from a creative perspective – to use it and outwardly express what I was experiencing – the lightness and the darkness. Some said that the drawings looked like scanned x-rays and then it was obvious that the dismantled furniture resembled skeletal remains.

With elements paired down to dark and light, I had a good idea of what it was I would do in the window space. But again I did not want to formalise this process or plan anything out in advance. I knew I would dismantle the chair and it would be strewn across the floor, and I had already resigned myself to hang the 22 x 1 metre works on paper, starting from left to right, high and low by feel and sight alone.

Once this was done, I placed a black square of scrubbed cork on the window with a piece of melamine lent against it to hold it there by gravity (an element I had recently used in a group show ‘Processed’ at Articulate Gallery in Leichhardt) I then grabbed the sanded pieces of chair and placed it randomly on the ground against the wall and the window.

My objective with using the SLOT window was to test the idea that smaller elements of my work could expand dimensionally to make a larger composite work in situ. Overtly to explore the connection of the drawn image and its source material and abstractly to reference my ongoing health condition.

Materials used: 22 strips of black sandpaper, pigment, 2 garden chairs, 1 stool, 3 pieces of melamine, 1 cork tile, 1 felt board

You can learn more about my show at SLOT here which includes an interview with Tony Twigg, artist and SLOT gallery owner.