Assistant Director of Learning and Public Engagement at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA)
mapping threads: the making and markings of nicole voevodin-cash
Thank you, and good evening. It is a great pleasure and privilege to be entrusted with speaking tonight as we celebrate mapping threads: the making and markings of Nicole Voevodin-Cash.
Many years ago, when I managed an art dealer’s gallery in Brisbane, I first met Nicole as she did the rounds as a regular visitor and participant in the art scene, usually on a Saturday.
That level of regular engagement and instinctive mode as an active viewer turns out to have been the fuel to research and propel a central tenet of her practice for over 30 years.
Rather than seeing the audience as separate from an artwork, Nicole has been interested in interaction as a sculptural and performative strategy, creating works that invite people to move, explore, play, touch, listen, participate and make their own connections.
Over those same decades, as a person also driven by the agency of art, I have long been fond of saying that an artwork is like a circuit – an open loop that isn’t closed until it has a participant to make it run.
It’s in that active mode when meaning is made and conveyed, and it is not limited to an author’s or maker’s intent.
It values the idea that a spectator is not passive and that personal interpretation is shaped, indeed facilitated by the loop they participate in, the emotion this allows, and the comingling of that moment.
Similarly, Nicole takes this further by asking what happens when the audience becomes part of the work.
A full answer has several parts, but more importantly, there is no single “right” response.
Generally, particularly since the 1990’s one part lies in the increasingly active notion of what was then coined ‘relational aesthetics’.
It argued aesthetics could be unshackled from two old chestnuts: beauty and purity of an object. This duo had become part of an orthodox, rigid art history rooted in western canons that had apparently confined beauty to certain passive ideals reinforced and perpetuated by the keepers of that history and academy.
‘Relational aesthetics’ arrived as a movement that emphasised the social interactions and relationships created through art’s agency. Rather than focusing solely on the artwork itself, a focus became thinking about objects as triggers for experience.
This movement, attributed to French curator Nicolas Bourriaud, wanted to expand traditional notions of art as a static object to be passively observed, instead encouraging active engagement and collaboration.
Consensus emerged around key concepts in relational aesthetics, which include
participation, social interaction, collaboration, everyday life, and the temporary and ephemeral nature of art.
Equally importantly was a framework of ‘affect’, and so another key facet of works aligned to the idea emanated from observation of audience behaviour – not just in museums and galleries – but in and from community. It made sense of art driven by motives beyond the white box and allowed many more voices to play in the space of a major art movement.
Immediately, you can see in this idea how comfortable and authentic it is to connect with this exhibition: one that brings together works from across Nicole’s practice, tracing her ongoing interest in connection, participation, memory, material and place.
What I appreciate most with this work is its obvious generosity of spirit, it’s open-ended user friendliness, its focus on interactivity and the space for an audience to feel the shifts that happen when viewing something goes from a passive mindful experience into something more corporeal, more bodily, more actively DIY.
I am cautious at this juncture to respectfully suggest, but not overplay or stray into hyperbole, that many of these ideas share astute commonalities with other practices that emerge from and in community, across cultures and even with the spirit and intent of some Australian First Nations art practices that foreground connection, participation, memory, material and place.
I don’t draw this parallel to imply appropriation or unacknowledged cultural borrowing, but only to observe other instances where we might see how formerly rigid art histories have opened up and become richer for new understanding, new perspectives.
As other and earlier French theorists also suggested, a precedent would be that there was no singular ‘modernism’ as such, but actually a vast array of ‘modernisms’ across various regions and hemispheres that enjoy shared tendencies, and that locate the ideas in a richer, larger tapestry.
Another way to approach this might be the simple notion that art and life are not separated – that everyday objects are in the art, and art is in every object.
In a show like this, where Nicole has set the rules that allow for far more engagement than we might usually expect in a ‘don’t touch’ environment we find ourselves as part of a shared activity, a group dynamic, where we are witnessing others encountering things in our own ways.
Her art may be as much about community as it is about her, and in what healthy communities can look like when a ‘fact’ undergoes diverse engagement. Rather than the artwork just being an encounter between you and her object, her variant of relational art also produces encounters between people.
Through these encounters, meaning can be elaborated collectively, physically, rather than in the mind of an individual, and it doesn’t have to be limited to being facilitated by art galleries – however grateful we are to Caloundra Art Gallery.
You might see in a work like Riverbeds a wonderfully useful and pragmatic solution to sound baffle in a large civic space, like Public Art as an acoustic aid, where the work has multiple roles, and has various audible capacity depending on your physical proximity.
Nicole’s practice also gets us thinking about play and the everyday.
A number of the works have historically been deliberately tactile and interactive including pieces designed to be sat on, moved or physically activated.
Her work starts before the object, with an invitation, and that cue to participate is catalytic no matter your age or knowledge of art.
Her ‘Mounges’, for example, are hybrid mound-lounges. They can be moved and sat on, while ‘Homely’ retains its playful invitation to sit and experience the work rather than simply observe it.
These works are proof of an abiding motivation to bring art into the territory of the domestic, social and familiar, where the boundaries between sculpture, furniture, play and everyday experience become deliberately blurred.
I want to conclude by mentioning some of the beauty that underpins her ideas, to expand a little on her process, her worldview, the foundations under these objects, and return to the notion of aesthetics.
Take her ‘Billycan drawings’, a work already over 800 days in the making, and still on the move. While they distil participation into a simple act of moving and tracing movement, there are performative and poetic licenses at play. We realise she sees people drawing with their bodies as they move through a place, transforming an ordinary walk into a creative act and a beautiful idea for art as an everyday act.
While the physical act and resulting drawings are both personal and collective records of movement, place and participation, they are also a lyrical, abstract and democratic idea that allows everyone to be an artist.
Nothing stands still, so to speak, in her art. We are all constantly adding sedimentary layers to spaces we occupy, strata of memory, experiences, social interactions – both vestige and potential.
‘Continuum’ is an important extension of these ideas into the digital space. In this work we are all encouraged to use our phones to activate the work as we move through the exhibition. Our presence and movement contribute to a collective drawing that evolves throughout the exhibition – technology as pencil, screen as substrate, movement as trace.
The drawing therefore doesn’t exist as a finished artwork at the beginning, it is generated through participation where every visitor leaves a trace, collectivised as a community collaboration.
For Nicole, this is the essence of mapping threads: the threads are the relations and dynamics between works, materials, places and people. We, the audience, are at once one of those threads, or a knot make up of them.
As she so beautifully puts it:
the work begins with me, but it doesn’t finish with me.
that is perhaps the most important idea i hope visitors take away from mapping threads.
Folks, you know what to do.
Thursday 15 October, 6–8pm at Caloundra Art Gallery
Simon Wright