Sawtooth is the bricks, the mortar, the windows: a repurposed building with its sawtoothed roof, reaching from the narrow constriction of the dingy staircase up to the high windows bringing the light in. It is a series of rooms periodically filled, from the darkness of the new media gallery opening onto the series of the white boxes making three exhibition spaces. It is the space created between the objects within the rooms: work fixed to the walls; works hanging into air, protruding and balancing; floors obstructed by plinths, paper gradually being tarnished, a series of bowls coming into being. It is an analogue space reaching into the digital – a website, a blog, a series of facebooked images and posts.

An artist-run initiative: the outcome of members of the local creative community coming together taking at its heart the gallery as a process. In a regional centre, defined by its distance from other geographical centres, it reaches out to bring in artists and visitors from the outside. It creates a platform for local practitioners, grounded in this place, to extend themselves: to try something different, to invite feedback, to call into being something they have imagined. Sawtooth invites disparate groups together around the table, offering a space for communities to come together: as a recurring gathering or as a temporary collective around an event.

Thoughts, discussions, exchanges: a series of dialogues provoked or enabled by Sawtooth. It can be a conversation consisting of assemblies of images and objects, glimpses from one gallery space to the next producing unexpected conjunctions. It can be works that in themselves galvanise new actions, with the resulting playfulness, experimentation and interchange between participants. It can be the relatively formalised meetings of the NewMat group or the casual chit-chat of the monthly cycle of openings. Ultimately, Sawtooth is a dialogue about the emergent possibilities of making in this community, this space, this moment.

Karen Hall SA

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Published by Sawtooth ARI

This project has been funded by the Regional Arts Fund through Tasmanian Regional Arts and Arts Tasmania

© Sawtooth ARI, the designer, authors and artists

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of Sawtooth ARI.

9 780646 916019 >

ISBN 978-0-646-91601-9

2013 Sawtooth Board: Marisa Molin – Director Patrick Sutczak – Chair Mae Finlayson – Vice Chair Helene Weeding – Secretary Serena Rosevear – Treasurer Gillian Marsden – Public Officer Mat Carey Mel de Ruyter David Hamilton Catherine Wolfhagen Sonja Brough

Editorial Group: Bron Fionnachd-Fein Karen Hall Deb Malor Patrick Sutczak

Photographer: Mel de Ruyter

Designer: Louise French

Printer: Foot & Playstead

Sawtooth ARILevel 1, 160 Cimitiere Street, Launceston, Tasmania 7250PO Box 1614, Launceston, Tasmania 7250sawtoothari@gmail.comwww.sawtooth.org.au

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IntroductionMarisa Molin, Director, Sawtooth ARI

Sawtooth is an artist-run-initiative gallery based in Launceston, committed to servicing our community through the provision of a quality exhibition program from February to December each year. Our mission is to showcase contemporary and experimental art by artists at various stages of their professional career.

Whilst maintaining this ethos, this year has seen considerable growth in the programs and platforms we now offer. With the assistance of project funding from Tas Regional Arts, Dr Deb Malor was initiated as our inaugural Thinker-in-Residence. This was a program that brought together like-minded practitioners to inspire critical discussion on the exhibitions we host along with various topics, including new materialism. The direct outcome of the Thinker and the passion of the group who came together in those sporadic gatherings was the Sawtooth Blog and this publication—a culmination of thoughts, reviews and ideas that reflect the artistic program of Sawtooth for 2013.

What you hold in your hands are the words of our local art professionals and practitioners. The common bond shared by all the contributors, despite their medium or field of practice, is the drive to think, challenge and explore the concepts and ideas of the artists who have engaged with our gallery.

Sawtooth’s vision continues to grow with new incentives and programs for 2014. We could not achieve all we have without the support of Arts Tasmania, Tas Regional Arts, the artists who have exhibited, the Sawtooth board and the community who continue to support our program.

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FebruaryRobert O’Conner (TAS): Haj Front Gallery

Michelle Knowles (QLD): Psychedelic Love Pussies & Other Terrestrial Nonsense Middle Gallery

Ben Taylor (TAS): The Threshold Project Gallery

Rhiannon James (TAS): Little Maids All in a Row New Media Gallery

Rhiannon James

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Through the LensMel de Ruyter

I document and observe an individual’s encounter with a work of art. I capture a moment of contemplation, that moment where the viewer meets the art for the first time. I often wonder what is running through their mind: are they analysing the work, does it remind them of something, what is it making them feel?

My job as photographer for Sawtooth is to verify the coming together of art, location and viewer, and to share this interaction with an external audience that has not attended a show. The images are also evidence that the line on the artist’s CV is a valid record of an event that actually took place. And yet, the images can make it look like the viewers are talking about artwork when they are probably just talking about the weekend ahead. At times, the camera becomes a tool for social interaction. In this process I disrespect its incredible abilities, instead cheapening it to a conversation tool.

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To obtain interesting images, it is important to me to be invisible at exhibition openings. To hear that people didn’t even notice me taking photos is a mark of success, especially when I’m taking photos of them. Without them realising, I am sticking my lens into their conversations, inserting myself into their encounters with each other and with the art.

Sawtooth’s main asset—its windows and their light and shade—often finds its way into the photos, peeping into the top of an image or throwing deep shadows into corners of the building. At first I found these shadows offensive and difficult to deal with as a photographer but, after living with them over time, I began to understand that they were part of this unique environment and that they should be celebrated instead of denied. These beautiful, long, angular shadows throw themselves on paintings and sculptures within the space. I see this layering as representing an artist’s work and its relationship to the space that is Sawtooth. Each month the space is transformed from a large empty room to a world of ideas, thoughts, feelings, emotions, conversations and encounters.

Below: Ben Taylor Right: Robert O’Conner

Michelle Knowles

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MarchTroy Ruffels, Michael Schlitz, Richard Wastell (TAS): Sea Front Gallery

Christopher R Morgan (TAS): Veil of the Shadow Middle Gallery

JoannA Pinkiewicz (TAS): Local Colour Theory: Summer Project Gallery

Gillian Marsden (TAS): pelagia, the geomorph, and me New Media Gallery

All My Love, AnonMae Finlayson

I hate the restrictiveness of clean lines and defined edges. Borders and boundaries are best when fuzzy, disrupted and challenged. For me, no inspiration comes from the crisp blankness of an untouched page, so I use found, already made, already handled, domestic craft objects as stimulation for new visual discourses. The handmade can never be ‘perfect’ so why pretend? Let us see the back, let us see the mistakes, let us see the interesting stuff and celebrate the completely (and perfectly) accidental imperfection—of us.

Right and over: Mae Finlayson

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9Troy Ruffels, Michael Schiltz and Richard Wastell

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AprilBimblebox Project (QLD) (Alison Clouston & Boyd, Donna Davis, Samara McIlroy, Liz Mahood, Glenda Orr, Jude Roberts, Jill Sampson and Gerald Soworka):

Document://Bimblebox Front Gallery

Madé Spencer-Castle (VIC): Infinite Exhibit Middle Gallery

Mae Finlayson (TAS): All My Love, Anon. Project Gallery

Bron Fionnachd-Féin (TAS): Modalities of Presence New Media Gallery

Emma Rochester (VIC): Amulets for a Golden Muse @Sawtooth Pop-up

Bron Fionnachd-Féin

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Excerpts from a NEWMAT DiaryDeb Malor, Thinker-in-Residence 2013

17 April 2013: There is a Space, a Thinker-in-Residence, and a Table at which to sit and Think. It seems best to set a date and a theme, to mark the start of the task of THINKING, using all the resources to hand. Soon there is a blog, the source of some of the following words. So begins the New Materialism group @Sawtooth.

26 April 2013: The first Saturday ‘Think’ @Sawtooth. As expected, once flagged, New Materialism appears everywhere, from Jussi Parikka’s web presence to the expanding forest of publications that link NewMat to visual arts practice in a variety of ways. Always there is the inadequacy of language to deal with the ENTANGLEMENT of materialising ideas. A proposition that NewMat can provide a methodology through which artists might articulate their ideas in support of an exhibition, through artist statements or catalogue essays, is about to be tested. Will the potent vibrancy of NewMat be reduced by its figuring as a means to numerous beginnings?

15 June 2013: At the Thinking Table, a visitor from New York listens as the group circles and dives, scratches and sprawls, in their efforts to materialise practice in

Madé Spencer-Castle

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Bimblebox Project

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thought and word. After over an hour, while taking a break to move and stretch limbs rapidly freezing in the winter afternoon under the unlined Sawtooth roof, she observes quietly that it is hard to discern any specific direction the group is taking. What variety of New Materialism were we attempting to follow or employ?

There is some reassurance to be found for the diverse group of artists and writers around the Table in the title of Coole and Frost’s anthology, New Materialisms: that plural ratified the fruitfulness of the disagreements that generated and sustained discussion long after the company met to talk further in front of Patrick Sutczak’s Hopeless Remnantic.

21 September 2013: Thinking about the space of galleries, the trust we have in curators to fill them thoughtfully and deliberately. The gallery as a box of mysteries: we channel JJ Abrams’ TED talk. Later, in Hobart, someone looks again at the small painted wooden box that has been placed deliberately on the floor, and states that they don’t do art like that anymore. But it’s a box. Not art. Not a plinth. Not a prison. But it can be a spark for IMAGINATION. (Does this scare you, articulating the unsayable, this thing that is barely comprehended?)

An excursion into the discourse on ‘things’ (Heidegger, Brown, Grosz) leads to Latour’s consideration of ‘matter’, of door-closers and so to the activation of architectural spaces. We consider Sawtooth’s anonymous street-front entrance. Materialising imagination (for example, a curated exhibition within the box that persists as the ‘ideal’ gallery) was seen as an act of TRUST. For any audience, there is a need for expectations aroused in the act of imagining to be met. The approach to a gallery space is almost always predictive, even when an imagining attempts to factor in elements of surprise or at least the less usual. Ritual is there to be undone but even the undoing has its limits. Does architecture call the shots, after all? Or, can the gallery space be thought of in other, more ANIMATE ways, even losing its visibility, extending what Paul Carter identifies (although of the works themselves) as ‘non-form’?

5 October 2013: A psychologist remarks, almost enviously, on the group’s ease with each other, even in disagreement. It would be easier for her to join us than for us to join her. But she cannot step outside her box, one whose interior is both predestined and hierarchical.

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(Re)thinking from within NewMat its organisational framework is fluid, possibly difficult to discern, its spatiality anything but hierarchical. The group does not just have to cope with each other but with the VIBRANCY of other, equal yet nonhuman, entities. With CARE, this can be done. With care, thinking can be productive, a COLLABORATION, a generative rather than a simply repetitive task.

1 November 2013: The wrap-up: a first-timer describes the experience as welcoming and inclusive: rather like New Materialism, should it be allowed to run not to its logical conclusion but in unending openness?

Timothy Morton’s idea of an ‘inclusive nature’, one that refuses the usual anthropomorphising that brings NATURE into the ‘human’ fold, resonates in new ways with current Tasmanian (and world) politics, both nature and its politics being touchstones for many of the artists in the group and those exhibiting in Sawtooth’s program. This same inclusiveness characterises the reciprocity of care at the heart of NewMat, allowing discussion of the most productive kind. Without conclusion, open to moderation: no promises, lots of backflips.

Emma Rochester

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MayLARQ Queenstown coordinating. Antonia Aitken (ACT), Catherine Hehir (IRE), Martin King (VIC), Prawat Laucharoen (NY), Steve Lovett (NZ), Troy Ruffels (TAS): Temporary Residency 4 Tasmania Front Gallery and New Media Gallery

Jennifer Dickens (TAS): Bubble Middle Gallery

Serena Rosevear (TAS): Interstitial Project Gallery

Sawtooth ARI Members Show @Sawtooth Pop-up

Amelia Rowe (Members Show

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The Magic of Art: The Potential of Mystery and Imagination Ashley Bird

The travel time from my home to work is about twenty minutes, not enough time for listening to anything too lengthy (and before coffee, too thinky). TED conference presentations run to around fifteen minutes so they are the perfect duration. Having selected at random from the TED podcast library, I was on my way to work and listening to director JJ Abrams talk. I had loved his films to date and was interested to hear his ‘idea worth sharing’. Rather than focus on a specific film, Abrams spoke about the idea of mystery being the catalyst for creativity. So a journey into the realm of mystery and a lesson in how important it is to challenge our expectations and stimulate our imaginations began with a serendipitous encounter with a film director through a random podcast.

With the help of an unopened childhood relic called Tannen’s Magical Mystery Box, Abrams illustrated that, if opened, the box would reveal $50 worth of magic tricks for the bargain price of $15 but, if left unopened, the contents of the box represented infinite possibilities. The unknown contents of the box create an

Serena Rosevear

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environment where the ‘not knowing’ is, as Abrams says, ‘a catalyst for creativity but also creative thinking through imagination’.

In the realm of arts practice the mystery box is the gallery, a large vessel for exhibiting creative output. Like Abrams’s magical mystery box, if left unopened the gallery could really contain anything. It is our need for proof that something exists in that space that is essential to the sort of thinking that keeps the box empty even if it remains unopened. Perhaps the ‘traditional’ art viewer can only

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understand art on a visual and tactile level but, if the gallery was a closed space with the promise of infinite possibilities within, it could be anything and nothing all at once.

An artist works hard on a body of work and labours over concept, choice of scale, texture, medium, colour. An exhibition curator spends time thinking of a creative premise and finding artists and the many-shaped gallery ‘boxes’ that could potentially display the work constantly linger in the curator’s mind. But does this

Steve Lovett

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space have to be seen? Can imagination, belief and trust be employed here to make the viewer an active part of a narrative that could be the same artwork by the same artist, curated by the same person in the same gallery as a traditional show?

The magic and mystery of the viewer’s mind could potentially make the show more of a unique experience. Each person who engages with such a ’show‘ (which itself is a single word that implies something will be seen) is not admitted into the gallery space and is instead asked to imagine the possibility of what the art may be, or what it could be. The seed can still be planted by both artist and curator, with the potential of the box becoming an imagination engine, with each machine unique to a curatorial premise, and each machine fuelled with an exciting array of unique gallery experiences inside the box.

While writing this piece I wanted to revisit the JJ Abrams TED talk online and turned to Google. Among the top search returns was a New York Times article about Tannen’s magic shop and the attention it had received since the TED talk. Modern mass media has a habit of jumping on things like this and I don’t have a problem with that. But in that article, the journalist visited an old-fashioned hole-in-the-wall shop in New York, purchased the magical mystery box, opened it and described the contents online. At that moment, the curtain was pulled back to reveal the wizard and I saw the strings. At the same time I had a greater understanding of what Abrams was getting at. Quite obviously once the box is open we all see the same thing and there is no mystery and there is no going back.

Abrams said himself that sometimes the best part of the film is when you’re in your seat and the lights go down moments before all the boxes are opened, and they can’t be closed when the lights go up. When the box or gallery is closed and unopened it could be empty but I guess it would be a far better sort of empty than after the mystery is revealed and that’s where we fill in with our own magic.

We can still watch Empire Strikes Back and be entertained even with the parental stress about to hit Luke Skywalker in the final act, but the there is nothing like the first experience of hearing Darth Vader give him some daddy issues. Perhaps cinema is a bad example but this all started with an artist working in this medium.

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Jennifer Dickens

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JuneArt3 - Penny Mason, David Marsden, Sue Henderson (TAS): Paper Planes Front Gallery

Helene Weeding (TAS): Capturing the Uncatchable Middle Gallery

Patrick Sutczak (TAS): Hopeless Remnantic Project Gallery

Darryl Rogers (TAS): Waterwalkers New Media Gallery

Stompin 2010-2013 (video) (TAS) @Sawtooth Pop-up

Bert Spinks (TAS): Life is Immense @Sawtooth Pop-up

Patrick Sutczak

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Mind MattersHelene Weeding and Patrick Sutczak

On 31 May 2013, Sawtooth ARI opened four exhibitions that represented six artists who were all linked to the University of Tasmania’s College of the Arts. In the New Media Gallery Darryl Rogers (an MFA candidate) showed his wavelike digital version of a ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ with Waterwalkers. Art3, consisting of UTAS Painting lecturer Penny Mason, sessional tutor David Marsden and Drawing lecturer Dr Sue Henderson, exhibited a collaborative installation called Paper Planes in the Front Gallery. In the Middle Gallery, UTAS PhD candidate Helene Weeding showed a body of paintings titled Capturing the Uncatchable. In the Project Space, MFA candidate Patrick Sutczak displayed Hopeless Remnantic, a series of photographs overlaid with text. These works expressed his desire to explore a particular landscape and reflected upon his interaction with, and response to, that landscape.

Art3

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Initially these four individual exhibitions seemed diverse but on closer inspection they displayed surprising similarities.

In Paper Planes Mason, Marsden and Henderson’s motivation centred on movement, reminiscent of toy handmade paper planes recalled from childhood, as well as horizontal and vertical spatial planes. The overall atmosphere generated by the installation was one of shifts in airflow, instability and unpredictability. The viewer became immersed in the overwhelming effect of long rolls of printed ‘wallpaper’ adhered to some walls by Henderson and Mason, which were complemented by Marsden’s constructions, often covered with drawings and prints from all three artists. Viewing induced an out-of-body experience where nothing seemed to settle and planes shifted constantly between 2D and 3D. As a result, imagination was heightened and at the same time it felt almost impossible to gather and retain the huge amount of information that was bombarding the senses. Yet Paper Planes also encouraged intimacy with small delicate pauses amid the objects displayed, and simultaneously spatial and material relations were highlighted, partly due to the effect of the non-traditional hang. The overall feeling generated was one of immersion but it was also coupled with disquiet so that presence and absence were both experienced, sometimes separately, and at other times in tandem.

In contrast to the absorption of Art3’s display, Weeding’s exhibition in the next space appeared initially to alienate the audience and make them adopt a position of being removed from the work. This was in some part due to the framing of the paintings and the ordered, almost regimental hang, in stark contrast to Paper Planes, which could be partially glimpsed in the next gallery space. As the viewer spent more time with the works the experience subtly shifted and drew the onlooker into the works, peering through the painted turbidity to try to decipher what was happening behind it. A sense of movement was felt also, but as a soft shifting veil, and the works stimulated an uncertainty of perception and a loss of solid reality. The closer the viewer came (both physically and perceptually), the further away solid forms slid and memory coupled with imagination to allow links to the past and present. Capturing the Uncatchable demonstrated an exploration of an inaccessible and at times abstract landscape, stimulated by a desire to generate an expressive response to wet atmospheric phenomena.

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With Sutczak exhibiting Hopeless Remnantic in the project space, the viewer was presented with an empty void flanked by a small arrangement of remnant deadfall on one side and almost an entire wall filled with a series of large-scale square digital photographs overlaid with block text on the other. The text, while being individual to each image, created a larger narrative of thoughts, observations and internal mutterings from the artist. With the deadfall branches providing a clue as to the source of the images, they prompted the viewer to consider the meaning and relationship between them. The branches represented a displacement and a deliberate rearrangement from the natural system of Midland remnant ecology where they had fallen. In the project space, and on a low plinth, they became decidedly ordered and disempowered. In a complementary way, the images filling the wall opposite appeared almost as a digital mosaic where, if the viewer chose not to see the words, they would see the image and vice-versa. The hierarchy was unclear and this was enforced by the words themselves that alluded to the multiple layering of human/nature relations coupled with images that depicted the altered landscape as a result of agricultural practices.

Within the darkened walls of the new media space however, Darryl Rogers’s Waterwalkers directed viewers into an immersive environment where not everything appeared as it seemed. T.S. Eliot’s epic Four Quartets (BN II: 16–21) provides a clue to the deeper emotional and ontological associations with Rogers’s installation work.

Darryl Rogers

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At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

Viewers were confronted firstly with a dual landscape projection piece almost intersecting in the corner of the room. Forwards and backwards at once, the projected images were reminiscent of the view from the window of a moving train and visually animated the concept of time in an uncanny way. Dividing the projections as the viewer entered further into the space, Rogers created the illusion of a ‘Pepper’s Ghost’, a haunting holographic-like projection of walking figures hovering in mid-air, seamlessly blending between gender and direction. While disguising the workings of theatrical design, Waterwalkers explored ideas

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surrounding the metaphysical and the material—the real and the imagined, the perceivable and the spiritual.

The four exhibitions were a unique intersection of ideas and creative research from which could be drawn more similarities than differences relating to their themes and to captivating approaches to the natural world—surface, material, scale, place, physics, turbidity, landscape, interventions and perceptions. All these elements converged through individual and collaborative arts practices that not only stimulated matters of the mind, but also unwittingly centralised the work as a cross-section of the University of Tasmania’s educators and post-graduate candidates exhibiting side by side at a space dedicated to Tasmania’s regional creative and cultural identity.

Helene Weeding

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JulyWill French (NSW): Lifted and Shifted Front Gallery

Peter Nelson and Belem Lett (NSW): Othering (Realities in Landscape) Middle Gallery

Bek Farry (TAS): Convicted Project Gallery

Marya Elimelakh and Romi Graham (NSW): Rocky Trilogy New Media Gallery

In Celebration of NAIDOC Week 2013, Rex Greeno and Will Stackhouse: Island Cultures – curated by Lola Greeno @Sawtooth Pop-up

Will French

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The Secret Jargon: A GlossaryGillian Marsden

Thing — a thing is an exceptional think. A thought in action? Or an action in thought? By abstraction, retraction or even retrospection, a thing is what remains after an analysis of its use. In conversation, where you care what other people think of you, or simply, when you care, these things would not be described as a thing: a human or an animal.

There are exceptions. A human can be imagined to say, “bring the thing over here” in relation to an animal. To use the word ‘thing’ invokes detachment, the gruffness of euthanasia or the slaughterhouse. Sometimes detachment is disrespect; sometimes, detachment is self-protective.

At other times, there is the safety of the collective. The word ‘things’ gathers disparate entities from across the order in order to bring them forth. In the most extreme contexts, ‘things’ creates communities in which no offence can be offered or taken. These ‘things’ may be saved in the event of an apocalyptic event: humans, animals, heirlooms. Ask the human in yourself, did this sentence offend me? Where is the threshold to detachment?

Marya Elimelakh and Romi Graham

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Threshold — the space, a moment that implies a delineation between things.

Bridge — the bridge is a structure that assists movement between places or spaces that are otherwise impassable, or more difficult to pass, without the bridge. There are exceptions. Decorative bridges, ceremonial bridges, token bridges, which might also denote hierarchies, cultural entanglements, and manners of approach, deportment. A physical bridge always carries ideas, for where a body moves, a collection of ideas moves as well. A bridge invariably expresses the human preference for fluidity. Or, the paradox of holding tethered (to each other) things away from each other.

Backdoor — traditionally, the more informal entrance way, whether into a domestic setting or a website. Arguably, because of its informality, it is a more privileged entrance. An entrance of power. The power to see dirty secrets, intimacies, to catch people by surprise. The backdoor is, therefore, an implication of trust. (I trust that you won’t expose me via my backdoor.) However, inherent risk is always present. Friends may still betray you. As for hackers, the backdoor is the site of power to dismantle the red carpeted front entrance of a website.

Frame — a plinth deprived of its dimensionality. Sometimes.

Left: Ben Farry. Right: Peter Nelson and Belem Lett

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Plinth — the lordly plinth. A delineate of importance, focus. Another version of the frame. Heightening effect, both physically and psychologically. Indicative of the secular western cultural practice of standing. Bringing the object to a level of comfortable approach while maintaining hierarchies. (I will not kneel to an object, even for a closer inspection.)

Entanglement — hierarchies of entanglement

Tangled hierarchy — consciousness and system, within which is found a strange loop, perhaps even multiple loops. A conscious construction. Levels.

An example of a consciousness system: Polly and George’s teaspoons. Polly’s weird teaspoons aren’t allowed in the cutlery drawer where they may contaminate the set (system) of teaspoons. If this cross-pollination occurs, they disrupt George’s system of consciousness. He gets cross. Sometimes, Polly exploits this accelerant to George’s anger.

Strange Loops — the moment where you end up where you began, within a system in which you thought you were ascending a hierarchy. It is something akin to the longest snake on the Snakes and Ladders board except in this game one doesn’t realise the role of the snakes until the conclusion of one’s descent. Bittersweet experiences.

Embodied — “All the real niggas in America, where you at or where the fuck u from We represent for y’all. We represent for, TA (throw it up) Naptown (throw it up) Tennessee (throw it up) St. Louis (throw it up) Jville (throw it up)” etc. (Lil Jon & Eastside Boyz – Throw It Up)

When a material form, matter, is recognised as having the ability to represent or express on behalf of an idea, an artist, a community.

Mattering — activity makes things matter. Bodies especially. Mattering refers to a thing being embodied. Mattering recognises import in even the most insignificant places and bodies. Does size matter? Only in a state of relativism. Size can only matter, or mattering, when measured against something else. In fact, the smaller the size, the more likely it is to harbour the weightiest of ethical considerations.

Insignificance — in which humans reduce their responsibilities by the relativism of scale.

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AugustLiam James (TAS): Newstart Payments Front Gallery

Mat Carey (TAS): I+E=Reality Middle Gallery

Chris Flood (TAS): IT was NOW Project Gallery

Nic Hamilton (VIC): Selected Video Works 2012 New Media Gallery

Mat Carey

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Un Dialogue de Mal DentJosh Foley Le premier haut-parleur: Peter Wolfgang Gabriel. Avec la participation d’ Amanda James, Xydep Xydahlia, Josh Foley

Peter Wolfgang Gabriel (PWG): So, who likes going to the dentist?

Josh Foley (JF): I’ll tell you what Peter, that architectural bridges discussion at the Plimsoll was like pulling teeth! That is the actual subject, isn’t it? Sore-tooth and associated happenings.

Amanda James (AJ): Are we commissioned to do this?

Xydep Xydahlia (XX): This is a perfect way to learn me some Australian!

PWG: You can just listen then, Xydep. Okay, so erm…

AJ: Josh, I want to know what you thought about the Sawtooth program this year— highlights. Do you have any disappointments or major regrets?

JF: I’ll tell you a little bit about what I think about it—then I’m going to sit back and watch the confusion spread. I don’t think I like Penny Byrne’s work as much after meeting her and hearing her talk about it. Is that totally natural? I think it’s

Liam James

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disenchantment—now I can see all the pieces, excuse the pun, see how they’ve been glued together, excuse the pun, and see the resulting spunky political statement at the end. Previously, I saw the work as this bizarre and radical thing—otherworldly. This is not to say Penny wasn’t articulate or a fantastic and generous person or that her work or its messages have lost any potency or relevance: it’s just eroded some of its magic perhaps?

PWG: That’s a big call Josh. But fair’s fair.

JF: I think this happens a little bit when I hear other contemporary artists discuss their practice too and as I speak now I am forced to reconsider how discussing my own practice may reflect poorly on my work or disenchant my viewers. I think it really depends on the work and the artist—that relationship. Sometimes it’s better to know more of the personality and history behind the work and sometimes it’s not.

AJ: Well you know some other artists whose work was shown at Sawtooth—name an example that is the reverse case to your experience with Penny and her work.

JF: (Shrugs his shoulders)

AJ: No-one?

JF: Oh yes! Nancy Mauro-Flude—since I heard about it—ah, her imaginary door, that is; I’ve been trying to paint it. (I have included Josh’s attempt at the end of this transcription, PWG) I liked to know more about Nancy’s work… I was already intrigued by the metal sheet tilting, her standing there on the pavement (the tessellated pavement Josh mentions here is a naturally occurring geological feature at Eaglehawk Neck, Southern Tasmania, PWG) but then to find out that the obscure gesture she had filmed herself acting out was her trying to discover a secret door and that she imagined the tessellated pavement might be an ideal place to conduct this door- 56445656456t4r4ate6ou457opksg564finding business because she finds the place otherworldly and thoroughly stimulating and possibly strange enough to have some cosmic, maybe kinetic forcefield that only needed to be adjusted with a certain material at certain angles—which would then reveal a backdoor—like the backdoor to a computer program, to the universe—nudged my initial interest in her film piece into some kind of obsssseesion (Josh said obsession theatrically, as specified, PWG). Maybe, not an obsession—I don’t want to scare anyone—but it certainly rang around in my head bone maybe for longer than if I

Right: Josh Foley

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didn’t know certain facts about Nancy and her projects. But, maybe this is because where Nancy follows an esoteric line of enquiry (although undoubtedly with political over- or under-tones) Penny’s work is fixed already more in the world of things and occurrences and possibly needs less explaining?

AJ: That’s just all outrageous conjecture.

Chris Flood

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JF: Ha! Okay, now I’m going to sit back and watch the confusion spread like peanut butter over the gums of a potentially talking horse.

XX: Ha! Josh is obsessed with Nancy’s door.

(Amanda and I giggle—Josh frowns at Xydep’s inappropriate contribution and our childish response, PWG)

PWG: Xydep! You rascal—I thought you were going to sit quietly and listen. Okay, so far great, guys—great. Where now? Maybe, Amanda, you could tell us about an exhibition or specifically a filmic piece that took your fancy, you’re the expert among us…

AJ: Well, I think a highlight was Matt Cottrell’s exhibition Penumbra. Matt is a friend of Josh’s and hearing him speak about his ideas and processes did not at all detract from the piece: maybe that was to do with the work being performative? Matt is less expansive and a touch cloudy when it comes to disseminating his motives but again that maybe relates to the type of work—being as it is an exploration of more perceptual/material/ontological concerns than the politics and historical aesthetics of Penny’s work. Can I say however that a common thread between the two is that there is a quality of the cerebral mixing with the aesthetic which I am always a little weak for. What about you, Wolfgang?

PWG: Merci beaucoup for asking, Amanda.

PWG: In February I bought a walking stick from Michelle Knowles who had a show in the Middle Gallery. Now this was one of those things that I just had to have—the art-buy impulse was triggered by the fact that not only did the work obviously strike a chord that said, “I’m having fun here—my name is Michelle Knowles but I also perform as a terrestrial love pussy and have photographic evidence of myself doing this in some fittingly abstract and sacred bushland all executed with a care-free aesthetic and displaying cultural sophistication”—but it also insinuated itself into my collection by its attachment to the two recurring motifs that define the pieces I own: it had stripes painted around it and it was attached to a figurative situation. Things I get have stripes or figures and Michelle’s work had both. She threw in a photo of her performing with the stick at aforementioned alien-landing-type Australian bush space and they are currently decorating my lounge room and possibly my mind. Gee, aren’t you glad you asked me for my opinion, AJ?

AJ: No.

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SeptemberKris Coad (VIC), Juz Kitson (NSW), Arun Sharma (NSW), Penny Byrne (VIC), Walter Auer (NSW), Serena Rosevear (TAS), Marta Armada (SPAIN), Addison Marshall (NSW), Sanne Mestrom (VIC), Alex Standen (NSW), co-curated by Serena Rosevear and Patrick Sutczak (TAS): Enucleo – Contemporary Clay Front Gallery

Matt Cottrell (VIC): Penumbra Middle Gallery

Nadine Kessler (TAS): RAT TAG Project Gallery

Janice Kuczkowski (ACT): Turkey Beach New Media Gallery

Fiona McIntosh and Garett McIntosh (TAS): ISLAND @Sawtooth Pop-up

Left: Penny Byrne (Enucleo) Right Nadine Kessler

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Artist-run Things (Death is No Failure)Fernando do Campo

I find myself confused and nostalgic when I hear eulogies for artist-run spaces; from the ashes and flames of one will rise the Phoenix, a future regeneration—stronger than ever! This talk is a safety blanket, and fair enough, as it follows endless hours of unpaid work by artists and curators to get things off the ground and, most importantly, keep an ARI open. But it’s also the kind of crap we say to make ourselves feel better after a ‘failure’, in agreement with funding bodies and in the trembling hope that the next rebirth will receive some coin. The reality is much more complex. More often than not this is the end for a given initiative. The sudden defunding of key operations or the unaffordable rental property market (ARIs tend to exist in the most quickly gentrifying areas in any city and, it could be argued, are partly responsible for such gentrification) make it almost impossible to find an artist with any energy left to fledge from the inferno. So why do we bother? Why do we lose sleep and sacrifice creativity in the face of an ARI’s death or failure?

Janice Kuczkowski

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Matt Cottrell

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As some kind of disclaimer, I must state that I write this as an artist and curator who has presented projects across numerous artist-run things (primarily galleries) and was partly responsible for establishing the beast currently operating in the guise of Sawtooth. While I forever support the artist-run gallery model I also think it wise to look onshore and offshore to discover which other artist-run initiatives are working well and why.

Australia has over three decades of formal artist-run galleries (I say formal as there are obvious earlier examples, but not run on current models) and while it’s brilliant that Westspace, Melbourne was named as part of the Contemporary Art Organisation Australia network this year, the shift from ARI to CAO is rare and is the result of huge amounts of work, strategic innovation and financial stability through diversity.

Interestingly, there are numerous other artist-run models that have pursued critical and artistic innovation above permanence or constitution.

Set up as temporary curatorial projects, or with predicted death notices, initiatives like Elvis Richardson’s and Claire Lambe’s Death Be Kind (DBK) (Melbourne, 2010–2011) or Susan Gibb’s Society (Sydney, 2012) are remembered with celebration rather than nostalgia, as triumph rather than as failure. DBK employed the subject of death as an overarching umbrella for the presentation of artworks and collections, leading to the death of the project (ARI) itself. Melissa Loughlan’s curatorial project Utopian Slumps evolved into a commercial venture and recently supported the launch of another space (potentially similar to the original Slumps), called Slopes Projects, which had a curatorial focus with an Aus/international gaze. It must be said that funding for these initiatives (and noting that many were self funded) was often project based rather than ongoing, with venues at nil cost.

Also in 2012, in Paris, Shanaynay was co-founded by Romain Chenais and Jason Hwang, in a city where artist-run galleries are now hard to come by. It embraces the artist-curator compound (common in ARIs but rarely unpacked until recently) while inviting its audience to engage with an artist-run public library. Books are donated (mainly by artists) and each book carries a card, with handwritten borrower details and borrowing/return dates. Shanaynay presents exhibitions that work within a specific curatorial brief, in a dialogue with both archaic and new filing and information-sharing systems and the individual practices of the two co-founders.

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In Vienna this summer I discovered one of the friendliest yet most critical contemporary artist/curator-run communities I have come across. Mainly operating through a healthy cohort of project spaces, these communities were run sometimes with project based funding or free rent through various schemes, but rarely with a call-out, incorporation status or contractual lease. HHDM (Hinter Haus des Meeres), established in mid-2012, now offers one of many artist-run platforms for the presentation of new work in Vienna. It’s unlikely HHDM will last forever—that was never the intention—but for a city that is ‘partially on the Euro art route’ and hosts major institutions alongside two historically significant art academies, it’s crucial to create, disseminate and cross-reference current practices through such spaces. Another project called PCNC_Bay also touches base in Vienna but operates without geographic borders. These ‘picnics’ set up sites for exchange and sharing that are often thematic, curated or designed by guest artists or curators (alongside the three founders, Anna Holtz, Lucia Elena Prusa and Manual Schweiwiller). The picnic offers an avenue for meeting, thinking and making. The collective has been invited to present this project across various sites, often reframing how textiles can constitute a tent or abode and how that space can then allude to an artwork or exhibition.

Jumping south there is Nuclei, a loose collective that is based in Tasmania. It was initiated by four sole practitioners and focuses on regional Tasmanian sites as a trigger for generating expanded writing practices and collaboration. Laura Hindmarsh, Alex Nielsen, Claire Krouzecky and myself designed Nuclei to recognise these shared and malleable points of intersection between artist, writer, curator and designer/architect. A picnic kit was a big part of Nuclei’s making, using the picnic, particularly the framing of a space with blankets and the sharing of meals, to trigger a fertile hub of activity. After conversations, documentation and publication, the Nuclei model is renewable, inviting new practitioners to run their course, yet always with an option for any future iteration.

Currently workshopping an ongoing exchange with artists in Auckland, NZ and ‘wandering’ all over the place are David Creed and Angela Rossitto. Wandering Room is based out of Brisbane and has presented gallery and non-gallery projects since 2007, as an ongoing ARI on wheels working between curation and collaboration. Throughout 2013, literally on wheels or via email across Australia, has also been Tarpspace, a blue tarpaulin and a basic framework allow you to pop-up your ARI wherever you like, often engaging with ‘established’ spaces and curating key artists to present within or with the ‘tarp’. In central Launceston, Tarpspace hosted Team Textiles at Outward Project, a free, low-key project space situated in an old

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mechanics bay which was launched in February this year by four established practising academics. Simultaneously, a tarp space (Henry Jock Walker’s Mobile Studio-HMS) redefined Sawtooth ARI’s Front Gallery.

And so we’ve come full circle. Up the road from Tarpspace’s current camp at Sawtooth ARI is where I now sit, in one of their new studio/office spaces that I’m renting for the summer. From this ‘space’ I can be part of an ARI without the responsibility for all the paperwork trails I spent years establishing as Director, trying to consolidate and streamline. I can curate my own walls (no-one need see them) work on my paintings and my written rants. I’m nothing more and nothing less than another ticking head in the powerhouse think-tank that Sawtooth has become—the program that generated this publication.

Sawtooth is a bit of a combo of many beings. It responds to a specific time (Tasmanian renaissance/financial drought) and place (regional Australian centre within a state with limited exhibition platforms) and hence it can follow a gallery model with a national focus, a critical sharing model due to its physical size, a regional support structure and community due to its location. I look forward to more Australian, particularly Tasmanian, ARIs that are not tied to a building, not dependent on grant funding and not bound by the resulting red tape. The Sawtooth model does not suit all and no ARI will last forever without a significant transformation. But right now this Phoenix that is Sawtooth is roaring full steam ahead (do Phoenixes roar?) and when its time comes, we will all celebrate its triumphs and put it to rest.

PCNC Bay

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OctoberGrant Nimmo (VIC): Shake Hands with the Pineapple Front Gallery

Mae Finlayson and Ashley Bird (TAS): Team Textiles present Knotlab Middle Gallery

Matt Gunn (TAS): Cause for Alarm Project Gallery

Excerpts from the FLINDERS FLICKS Film Festival (TAS) New Media Gallery

Stephen Hobson (QLD) (Gorge Cottage Residency): Cataract Gorge @Sawtooth Pop-up

Grant Nimmo

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Pastime with Good Company: Knotlab – Team TextilesKaren Hall

To knot is to hold things together. In the Team Textiles’ October 2013 exhibition at Sawtooth ARI, titled Knotlab, a diverse array of objects, people and processes are held together in a chaotic and irreverent exploration of work, play and the shadings between. While larger-scale assemblages form a static part of the exhibition, the workspace created by a trestle table on the left side enables its evolution. Each Saturday, this table is occupied by Team Textiles, their associates and visitors, adding work to the exhibition through both products and processes. The debris of work—rubbish on the floor, mess on the table—speaks through traces, illuminating the labour of making by what is left behind.

The central space in the gallery is surrounded by large knots made from bolster-like fabric tubes emerging from the walls, like a lounge room gone feral. Square

MATT GUNN

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Mae Finlayson and Ashley Bird

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sewing machines, monolithic remnants of the 1970s, sit to one side, covered in gold leaf, joined with glittering cords to an upside-down gold-painted spinning wheel. Spectacularly decorative and spectacularly useless, they suggest the displacement of useful home activities with the more existential angst of Joseph Beuys—how to explain art to a dead sewing machine. The centre of the room is filled with spinning wheels: tilted unstable, held in place by tension. Their bright colours—yellow, blue, orange, pink, green and red—render these as frivolous despite their role as barrier and obstruction within the space.

On the wall behind the trestle table are collections of yarns and other materials standing ready for use. Scattered amongst the collection are some toggled scarves—like those worn by Boy Scouts. These scarves suggest that the work being done here can, like that done in return for Boy Scout badges, be a sign of accomplishment and skills for life in the imagined wilderness of the domestic realm; or, alternatively, as mere busywork for children. The pink insouciance of the scarves subverts claims for endeavour into a space for play. Similarly, the cloth gradually filling the weaving frames leaning against one wall is not intended for functionality. The colourfully textured yarns, with pieces protruding from the surface, evoke geological layering or sedimentation. You are reading the work’s history as it builds up, with a sense of time that is not bound to the business hours nor with an end and a neat finish in mind.

Peopling the exhibition are a host of quipu dolls—completed dolls pinned to the wall and others in the process of being made. Combining kewpie dolls from the realm of Aussie nostalgia with the quipu knot system used as a method of record-keeping in pre-conquest Andean South America, these dolls mark the presences at the exhibition, capturing the faces of visitors and applied to the dolls by Team Textiles. Their printed faces are generated from a repurposed old video game system configured to act as a camera. Here the revival of obsolete technologies for non-intended purposes duplicates the original function (making a record, producing a leisure experience) but also disavows its intended usefulness.

A work space. A play space. Tied together, Knotlab at Sawtooth brings into being a world in which the making of work is played out.

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November2013 RACT Tasmanian Portraiture Prize Front and Middle Gallery

Christl Berg (TAS): currents and so on Project Gallery

Nancy Mauro-Flude (TAS): Self Portrait New Media Gallery

Phoebe McDonald (QLD): A cloud can never die: Ice, water, mist @Sawtooth Pop-up

Vanity Apocalypse: Self-Portrait in the Age of the #Selfie Nancy Mauro-Flude

This is a ficto-critical text describing the background that informed the work Self Portrait, featured in the Sawtooth New Media Gallery. The text was motivated by Tilda Swinton: In the Spirit of Derek Jarman, notwithstanding the nourishing conversations with Deb Malor and the ‘NewMat3 mob’, that took place in person and remotely through the ether, on the internet.

The video Self Portrait is shot at Tessellated Pavements, Tasman Peninsula, an uncanny location for locals, geologists and convicts alike. The matrix-like slate rock resembles a labyrinth. To solve its mystery would provide transcendence for many different kinds. Perhaps it is a platform to elsewhere, an underworld whose backdoor entrance others and I are yet to find? Standing behind a mirror and holding it, the mirror is also a type of threshold. I am attempting to use it as a cypher key to pick the Tessellated lock to the backdoor.

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Historically mirrors are not only a tool, but a medium that enables us to perceive what is not immediately visible. Before telecommunications (and the internet), mirror systems and cypher codes were used to channel messages from one entity or dimension to another. The mirrors reflected light in order to transmit signals over a distance to remote presences, even to stars and other worlds. This communication technology was widely implemented in the 17th century through research on rays of light and mirrors by magüs John Dee. It is all fixed with smoke, light and mirrors and it always will be. These are the basic laws of working with an audience.

Ever since I was opened up to the possibility of the backdoor, I have kept on returning to the curious quote of Kleist (1810) who, in On Marionette Theatre, claimed that “Paradise is locked and bolted, and the cherubim stand behind us. We have to go on and make the journey round the world to see if it is perhaps open somewhere at the back”.

I want to pick that lock to the place that Kleist calls Paradise. He seems to be informing us to find a method that bypasses normal authentication. To sneak under the fence, look for—and find it—with fellow travellers elsewhere. Leave behind the cherubim, and embrace instead the imperilled, the cheats, the undaunted and inspired rule breakers, not with the missive and corporate steering groups. Not the goody-two-shoe types with well-rehearsed bedside manners and creative industry know-how.

A backdoor works in the background, hidden from the more ‘formal’ user, often you can just sense it is there. In the same way, many of us know how to use our friend’s backdoor when we go to visit, but we haven’t undergone a formal induction process for our validation to proceed to the next level. And as such, the backdoor is often a clandestine entrance, known to an intimate few and deliberately left in place by such critical engineers for ease of access.

With this self-portrait I am creating an allegorical backdoor, securing a remote entrée, obtaining access while attempting to remain undetected, at least by the institutional mainframe. In the age of pervasive facial recognition and social-media- inspired insistent narcissism, this personal motivation should be hardly surprising. Therefore this self-portrait is vehemently unlike the modern day #selfie. In this age of the vanity apocalypse this mirror doesn’t want to reveal its secret too easily, because it understands the many levels of intelligence and (in)security.

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The mirror is truly beautiful as all one has to do is admire its fascinating beauty of reflection. But don’t mistake this replication for a sparkling postmodern surface. Because of its beauty one tends to forget that the true fascination of the mirror lies beyond all matter, all beauty and all action that transports us into another realm. Jean Cocteau, in his 1950 film Orphée, gives us a curious allegory: he also uses mirrors as doors to elsewhere. On arrival, Orphée asks: “Where are we? Do all mirrors lead to this zone?” The question elicits a response from a gatekeeper: “Life takes long to die. It’s the zone…made of memories and the ruins of human habit.” In this self-portrait I wish desperately to pass over the individual. I wish to disappear behind the mirror. To transcend what Kleist acknowledges as afflicted with the inertia of matter, the property most resistant to dance.

Performing with the mirror I have to make sure I am continuously aware and present, that is, I am just and solely concerned with the things I am doing in the moment. Yet simultaneously I am absent because my whole being is taken up by holding the mirror. I do not perceive myself as somebody. Meanwhile I am there. I am where I am supposed to be. I am only with what I do. However the true power of the mirror in whatever technology we are able to work with lies in the absence of its looker, the absence of its own. How much can the ‘I’ disappear behind the actions, and the endless number of noises that want to bring to life, all that is not me? The only thing I am essentially concerned with is my performer’s presence. How should I be, what should I do? Should I perform anything at all? Is it the mind or the soul, or is it the energy that convinces while performing? Am I being a medium enough for others to speak through me?

What a strange world it is that promotes us to have an exportable identity. And what grace constitutes one not to be identified as a product. The dead hand of Good Taste has commenced its last great attempt to buy up every soul on the planet, and from where I’m sitting, it is in the form of the #selfie.

I hope that it offers a small antidote to the mirrorball of the seemingly endless self-promotion, the marketable, the artful without the art, and the meaningful devoid of meaning. Instead it validates that moment of awkward zing, that loose corner: where we might prize up the carpet and uncover the rich slates of rock for something we might recognise as spirit lies underneath.

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DecemberHenry Jock Walker (SA): Oil on Hiace (Henry’s Mobile Studio) Front Gallery

Angela Casey (TAS): The Passage Middle Gallery

Angela Casey and Ross Byers (TAS): A Collaborative Sculpture Project Project Gallery

Kat Clarke (VIC): What I Would Like People to Think New Media Gallery

Lee Harper (TAS): ...and the sorrow... @Sawtooth Pop-up

Henry Jock Walker

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Henry’s Mobile StudioHenry Jock Walker

Henry’s Mobile Studio (HMS) is the core of a range of projects happening as a journey around Australia, May 2013–January 2014. The portable studio/gallery (tarpspace)/workshop/painting machine has created many solo and collaborative live performances, installations and happenings. A Toyota Hiace van has been the all-in-one home, studio, venue and carrier for the project.

This journey is the basis for a live performance I am developing for the Next Wave Festival 2014 through the Kickstart program. The journey evolved from a focus on expanding the conceptual framework of the studio and gallery. It is the beginning of a shift in my practice to embrace new forms of collaboration and research, and aims to have a positive effect on the social dynamics of various communities around Australia.

In many communities, HMS/tarpspace has combined forces, merging the materials, expertise and ideas on board to cater for workshops for all interested. This has been the sketchbook for developing new collaborative processes, nurturing shared cultural experience and teaching new DIY skills and ideas around art.

A collaboration specific to Sawtooth and its national showing schedule and audience was with Gregory Hodge, a euphoric bouncy ball of intuitive mark-making with various painting machines. I met Greg one night at Sawtooth in August 2012. I was in Launceston for Ray Harris and Celeste Aldahn’s opening and Greg was there supporting his partner Claire Thackway, who was also showing in Sawtooth. That night we talked about art, painting and surfing.

We’d been in touch briefly through the year, and I was hoping to get some surfing in with Greg on the way through. We tried to tee up a day of surfing but the days were not quite lining up with work commitments and bad waves. While on a tight time schedule driving from Sydney through Canberra on the way down to Victoria we caught up for coffee. As Greg explains:

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I wanted to show him my studio before he left and a quick coffee on Sunday morning turned into an epic day of painting and collaborating. ‘Co-Lab’, Jock calls it.

We parked the van out the front of my studio and I talked about some of my new paintings while pulling out a few canvases and boards that were tucked away either unfinished or unused. He gets excited when I show him some of the painting tools I’ve been making with and he quickly responds with his own paint machines that he’s invented on the road. Spinning tops, industrial blowers, anything that can make a mark. He asks me what I reckon about how we could fix a painting to the rear window and use the windscreen wiper.

We pull from the van a selection of his Surf Paintings. A series of 50 or so small canvases, mostly in blue fluid acrylic. These are made in the surf, he explains. It’s a kind of endurance event where Jock paddles out either by himself or with a mate and, holding the canvas out of water, he attempts to start and finish a painting on one wave.

In a short space of time we have gutted the remaining contents of the van onto the lawn in front of the studio. We quickly have paint flying everywhere and during the remainder of the day we start and finish a dozen or so paintings. Some of these

Angela Casey and Ross Byers

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were done in a few hours with both of us working over each other’s marks and allowing for layers to dry. We make a purple painting on unstretched canvas in just two moves. It’s the best one.

Before Jock leaves we tape a few unfinished boards and canvases to the side of the van and on the roof. These paintings are made on the road by hurling paint out the driver’s side window while driving at 110km down the highway. Evidence of previous works in blue and orange covers the entire driver-side panel with ghostly rectangles of white, exposing the van’s original colour where canvases have been taped then removed. Jock tells me on the phone the next day that he lost one of the paintings we strapped to the roof. It flew off somewhere as he was driving down the highway.

The performance “636”, undertaken at the opening of Oil on Hiace (HMS) at Sawtooth, was based around the model of this workshop. Any materials available for use in the van were placed in a pile on the gallery floor. Henry began by using golf sticks to make tripod sculptures (inspired by Trevor Jenkins, the rubbish warrior) and different arrangements. I invited viewers to hold various materials such as surfboards, poles and tape. I then invited people to join me and use any of the materials to make or wear the various costumes such as wet suits to perform different painting and making actions. There was not a prescribed outcome. Instead, it was more a designated space for intuitive play and hands-on exploration of my practice.

Lee Harper

56Kat Clarke

Published by Sawtooth ARI

This project has been funded by the Regional Arts Fund through Tasmanian Regional Arts and Arts Tasmania

© Sawtooth ARI, the designer, authors and artists

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of Sawtooth ARI.

9 780646 916019 >

ISBN 978-0-646-91601-9

2013 Sawtooth Board: Marisa Molin – Director Patrick Sutczak – Chair Mae Finlayson – Vice Chair Helene Weeding – Secretary Serena Rosevear – Treasurer Gillian Marsden – Public Officer Mat Carey Mel de Ruyter David Hamilton Catherine Wolfhagen Sonja Brough

Editorial Group: Bron Fionnachd-Fein Karen Hall Deb Malor Patrick Sutczak

Photographer: Mel de Ruyter

Designer: Louise French

Printer: Foot & Playstead

Sawtooth ARILevel 1, 160 Cimitiere Street, Launceston, Tasmania 7250PO Box 1614, Launceston, Tasmania 7250sawtoothari@gmail.comwww.sawtooth.org.au

Sawtooth is the bricks, the mortar, the windows: a repurposed building with its sawtoothed roof, reaching from the narrow constriction of the dingy staircase up to the high windows bringing the light in. It is a series of rooms periodically filled, from the darkness of the new media gallery opening onto the series of the white boxes making three exhibition spaces. It is the space created between the objects within the rooms: work fixed to the walls; works hanging into air, protruding and balancing; floors obstructed by plinths, paper gradually being tarnished, a series of bowls coming into being. It is an analogue space reaching into the digital – a website, a blog, a series of facebooked images and posts.

An artist-run initiative: the outcome of members of the local creative community coming together taking at its heart the gallery as a process. In a regional centre, defined by its distance from other geographical centres, it reaches out to bring in artists and visitors from the outside. It creates a platform for local practitioners, grounded in this place, to extend themselves: to try something different, to invite feedback, to call into being something they have imagined. Sawtooth invites disparate groups together around the table, offering a space for communities to come together: as a recurring gathering or as a temporary collective around an event.

Thoughts, discussions, exchanges: a series of dialogues provoked or enabled by Sawtooth. It can be a conversation consisting of assemblies of images and objects, glimpses from one gallery space to the next producing unexpected conjunctions. It can be works that in themselves galvanise new actions, with the resulting playfulness, experimentation and interchange between participants. It can be the relatively formalised meetings of the NewMat group or the casual chit-chat of the monthly cycle of openings. Ultimately, Sawtooth is a dialogue about the emergent possibilities of making in this community, this space, this moment.

Karen Hall SA

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