Landslide
Landslide
The sculptures, installations and films of Australian
artist Mel O'Callaghan are environmental and
architectural representations that draw on a notion of
desertion and fusion with atmospheric and natural
elements.
Through their system, these elements
evoke the human being, often absent, or overcome by
his environment. By reproducing these phenomena,
the artist draws our attention to those events that often
go unnoticed in their own right, but are noticed and felt
through their repercussions. Here, it is the conceptual
and poetic potential of our environment that is made
visible. In landslide, Mel O'Callaghan presents an
installation reproducing a natural phenomenon in its
cyclical and spatial temporality. The space of the
gallery is invaded by an atmospheric turbulence;
although invisible and immaterial, this turbulence fills
the space, rendering it opaque, and ultimately creating
a feeling of perdition as a result of the unknown that it
arouses. Despite its intangibility, the matter takes on a
sculptural density and creates a new dimension within
the space.
Mel O'Callaghan plays on the fragility of the matter and
the power of its effects, although it is of course non-
matter, colourless and almost invisible but also
impalpable and unlimited in the forms it can take. This
shifting sculpture is also indeterminate in its
temporality, growing via a process of expansion in the
space and through the matter's intrinsic potential for
regular and irregular movements.
A second installation revisits the visual principle of
nomadic tents. Yet the lines of this temporary, mobile,
adjustable dwelling find an analogy with the silhouette
of mountain tops, alluding to its volumes and
contours. Mel O'Callaghan uses the potential of the
taut canvasses to create variations in shape and a
state of uncertain stability that postpones a notion of
rupture. The properties of the matter are utilised and
pushed to their limits in a play-off between the
changing and the immutable.
In the artist's latest film the camera follows the
contours and muted colour of a vast and treacherous
environment where a figure - apparently lost in this
boundless space - can be seen. Unnarrated, the
figure's seemingly random movements are lost in the
infinite environment in which he finds himself but
which somehow eludes him. Nature, bleak although
peaceful, is ultimately impregnated with the human
condition that it encompasses and remodels
continually.
In Mel O'Callaghan's work, a slow process of change,
stretched out in time and space, emerges as a
revealer of material substance, showing the instability
of form, but also a cyclical constancy in the transition
from one state to another. The human element is all
but absent, although present metaphorically through
the internal systems of these kinetic works.
The viewer observes these phenomena within the
exhibition space, but, while he experiences them, he
is not subject to the consequences of the interaction
between a natural force and the human will to control
nature. Despite the monumentality of these works, a
certain intimacy is established between the spectator
and the piece recapturing the model of the human
condition: unstable and in a permanent state of flux.
The artist will be showing one of her latest sculptural
installations at the annual festival 'Printemps de
Septembre' in Toulouse. (September 21th to October
14th, 2007). She lives and works in Paris.
Image: Mel O'Callaghan, All In One Day, 2007, water, motor, refridgeration system, plexi-glass, steel, timer, 180 x 60 x 55 cm. Courtesy of galerie schleicher+lange, Paris
Galerie Schleicher+Lange
12 rue De Picardie Paris