Lisa Sharp: 49 Sighs at Factory 49 catalogue

Lisa Sharp

A Single Sigh, 2017

Factory 49

2– 6pm Thurs – Sat 49 Shepherd Street Marrickville NSW 2204

factory49.blogspot.com factory49@optusnet.com.au (+61 2) 9572 9863

My practice continues to explore the ways in which the form of paintings, reduced and remade, can conflate the material language, concrete processes and art history of painting. For ‘painting’ is action, object and ongoing historical discourse, all at once.

The installation 49 Sighs at Factory 49 uses the absence of paint to point to traditional painting materials and expectations about painting as potentially expressive sources of meaning. Support, surface and paint are always addressed in my works, to varying degrees.

Take the word gesso and say it with a sigh. An Italianate word, it references a certain art history but it has also entered the discourse of painting as a mundane painter’s task. To gesso is the first step in preparing a canvas for the action of painting. Yet to gesso is also to be poised at the beginning of painting, a white utopic moment brimming with optimism and promise.

In its traditional form gesso is warmed glue with dissolved gypsum (or chalk) and pigment. It seeps into the fibres of the canvas, isolating and protecting it from the corrosive action of paint. The canvas textiles of 49 Sighs are taken from the domestic context and are heavy with personal histories of human use. Rituals around nurture, grief, love and loss accompany muslin teabags, cotton duck, swaddling cloths, tarlatan drawings, bandages, tea towels and cheesecloth.

Coated in gesso and formed wetly around a contained breath, a sigh, their dried form is a prepared canvas in the form of a husk or empty container, absent of paint yet redolent of its presence.

Lisa Sharp July 2017

27 July – 5 August 2017

Opening 6-8pm Thursday 27 July Artist Opening on Saturday 29 July 2-6 pm, Sunday 30 July 1-5 pm & Saturday 5 August 2-6 pm

49 Sighs

49 Sighs is an installation of 49 paintless paintings. Using the material language and rhythms of painting, these paintings-as- sighs draw on the interactions and metaphorical possibilities arising between reductive materials, form, process and body. In this series of paintings without paint, the Sighs substitute the absent human body for paint as body. Supported by a single stretching tack, canvas surfaces containing recycled domestic textiles hold not paint but the form of an exhalation (a sigh), sealed with beeswax.

Lisa Sharp is an artist, writer, curator and co-gallery manager living and working in Sydney.

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