Sandra Selig
Brisbane
2019
Displayed 2019 at Art Gallery of New South Wales
Sandra Selig
Born 1972, Seven Hills, New South Wales. Lives and works Brisbane
Since her first solo exhibition in Brisbane in 1999, Sandra Selig’s artworks have been a poetic evocation of ideas and phenomena at both quantum and cosmic levels of existence. Her works are often made with commonplace materials such as sewing thread, paper, string, book pages or electric light and have more recently involved elemental forces such as the wind or gravity. Often, her minimal use of materials emphasises what is absent. The balance between materials and space is carefully tuned so that what might be ordinarily perceived as emptiness is charged with a curiously calm but tensile energy.
Artist text
by Nathan Shepherdson
The contradiction of scale is to imagine the whole. Sandra Selig’s work is about what remains rather than what is; vestiges in minor and major scale. For The National 2019, Selig offers two works that persuade us of an alternative view by their scale: Content in a Void (2018), a series of cut-poems that leave out more language than they leave in, and One Rotation (2019), a wall work in which lines speed out of and/or into a circle defined by coagulated absence.
Content in a Void is suspended within the two distinct actions of reading and looking. Swiss poet José-Flore Tappy lends Selig’s work an apt simpatico in philosophy and process:
Emptiness is an integral part of poetic speech, like rests in music. It takes me a long time to work out the necessary blank lines between certain lines, to place them in certain spots. Knowing what one says and doesn’t say; what one reveals and what one conceals. Meaning lies in restraint, in what is withheld. (1)
Selig’s cut-poems have punctuated her output for over a decade. It is redaction by air. The difference with this group is the added restriction of using contents pages only from the books she pulls apart. The body is discarded. In this series the emphases are word, paper, hole – like magnified fragments from a modernist pianola roll. Each contents page is surgically erased, reduced to a self-defining epitaph strangely capable of germinating the visual senses. One sheet is distilled to I / hid / in / Matter. This reminds us that words, too, are matter pulled from their language-mass by memory. Selig creates the remnants of what is not there by exposing us to what is there, which can only remind us of what was there. The cycle is perpetuated by being displayed with mirrors that absorb, reflect and reverse all that can be seen or said in a few words.
One Rotation, the 30-metre wall work Selig has created in situ, has no words but could be read as an aperture for the infinite. What we see is a result. Selig’s work often tosses us the keys so we can imagine how we got there. At its simplest, it’s a geometric hive of tangent lines drawn at right angles to a circle. It is an epic of intent, a singular pattern that we can walk, level with our eyeline; be it towards, away, around or through. The charcoal used was a stick of evacuated carbon; the compressed dust of shadows. It is another example of Selig’s physics-meets-lifeline approach; democratic but headless arrows from which she makes the large from the small or the small from the large. One Rotation eroded itself into existence from the pressure of her hand. That pressure also had a voice or a music in creation, which we no longer hear. (Selig declined assistance in drawing the work to coax its authenticity from one set of fingerprints.) Our own lines of sight attempt to follow but cannot entirely absorb its movement, because of its magnitude.
In ‘Elementals’, Tappy surmises, ‘as it progresses / what is infinite in space / withdraws’. (2)
One of Selig’s three-word poems tells us space / is / medicine. Selig always seems ready to up the dosage of light & silence. Perhaps her eye is a valve, an instantaneous vat to ferment light as memory.
Notes
(1) José-Flore Tappy, Sheds/ Hangars, trans. John Taylor, Bitter Oleander Press, New York, 2014, p.218.
(2) ibid., p.169.