22 February - 12 April 2014

Curator's forewordDecant is an exhibition of sculptural and installation work by Fairfield City Museum & Gallery’s inaugural artist in residence, Kath Fries. Responding to objects in the Museum’s collection that were found on the banks of Prospect Creek, Decant explores how the passage of time and containment of memories can be poetically reflected in the residue and trace of pouring water.

Kath Fries, a Sydney based artist who works with a site-responsive process across installation, sculpture and drawing, has created a series of site-sensitive works which reference a number of Chinese ewers from the Museum’s collection. The subsequent work enables viewers to engage with items from the Museum’s collection in a new and thought provoking way.

Fairfield City Museum & Gallery’s collection is unique in that it documents the social history of the Fairfield area and highlights the impact that migration has had in creating a vastly multicultural Western Sydney. These Chinese ewers are symbols of the long and varied history of migration in the Fairfield Local Government Area (LGA), which began with early European colonists, and led to the transformation of the region into what was to become the signature produce of the area: grapevines, market gardens, dairies and poultry farms. Prospect Creek itself was a vital food source for the traditional owners of the area, the Cabrogal people, and also played an integral role in providing the Fairfield LGA with a rich plant, aquatic, hunting and farming environment1, which attracted and still attracts many migrant families. Fairfield has become a cultural mosaic made from the footsteps of many communities as they arrive, survive and continue to live in the area.

Fairfield City Museum & Gallery is one of Fairfield City’s greatest resources, at the forefront of creating and representing interpretations and exhibitions about our past, heritage, and of our culturally diverse communities.

Helen JohnsonSocial History & Exhibitions Curator, Fairfield City Museum & GalleryFairfield City Council

Kath Fries’ intricate installation works are transient settings created primarily through the artist’s reflections on and responses to the world around her. Fries describes her work as ‘site-sensitive’; an outcome achieved whereby the artist quietly inserts herself into any given environment, explores its physical elements, investigates its social, political, historical context, and then discovers the unlikeliest fragment that is merely one small, seemingly insignificant component of the larger picture. And it is from this point that Fries creates; as though she has uncovered an unknown treasure and delights in deciphering its mysteries and artistic possibilities for herself.

Fries’ work is akin to the Arte Povera movement of the 1960s and 70s, the proponents of which had, at their core, the desire to break down the “dichotomy between art and life”1 and to shun the institutional systems which nurtured the commercialisation and POPularisation of art. Theirs was a movement which focused on building micro-environments where various and apparently unrelated aspects of the everyday – particularly nature – cohabited with those of high art; and further, where the viewer’s interaction was paramount to the realisation of the work of art.

As a contemporary incarnation of Arte Povera, Fries’ practice combines labour-intensive process with found objects. In the artist’s micro-environments, objects, ideas and specimens that are often overlooked are given credence. Here, Fries creates intersections where art and the quotidian are considered under the same spotlight in order to invite the viewer to contemplate such innocuous items as holistic elements rather than merely fragments of the everyday.

Charged with leading Fairfield City Museum & Gallery in a more contemporary direction, Fries was given free rein over the museum’s collection of artefacts to channel her particular knack for reinterpreting non-art objects into art that activates the gallery space. What she uncovered was characteristically ‘Fries’ – two bulbous-shaped ceramic bottles, of Chinese origin, found in 1986, having once contained soy sauce or rice wine.

Decant is both a continuation of Fries’ ongoing themes of impermanence and memory, and a statement about the significance of the ewers to the rich socio-historical landscape of the local region. Fries’ installation consists of a series of crudely-constructed clay pots which have been moulded from the original ewers and delicately dissected. These replicas float on top of artificial clay beds which meander through the gallery, imitating the path of Prospect Creek, the site of the ewers’ discovery. An assemblage of bark, twigs and leaves, found on the banks of the creek, trail along the gallery walls, while sounds and video imagery of the water’s flow permeate from a miniature projection which escapes through openings of ewer replicas. Decant is

a wholly encapsulating installation which draws the viewer into a space concocted through the intermingling of nature and artifice.

Most interesting are the ewer replicas from which the artwork received its name. Decanting – a fancy word for pouring – was the process by which Fries sought to imbue each identical replica with individual markings; to make each unique – or at least have the appearance of uniqueness. Once removed from their silicone moulds, the clay replicas were subject to the time-consuming process of having water continuously poured into them, in an act which mirrors the natural course of water through any landmass, whereby the earth is eventually transformed by the water’s constant flow. In Fries’ studio practice, the gushing of water onto unfired clay led to the erosion of the replicas, causing them to crack and break under the water’s pressure. And if the process were to be continued, the clay would simply dissolve and be returned to the earth.

The clay ewers have endless possibilities. They can be decoded, unpacked and analysed in a myriad of tangents that relate to Fairfield’s rich social fabric and its diverse peoples past and present; to the endless metaphorical significances of water itself; to the artist’s unusual process of making them as unfired, unfinished replicas of objects themselves long-discarded and obsolete; to the binary relationship between art and the everyday; and to the history of Postmodern and Contemporary art which at once accepts and rejects the notion of the unoriginal, the copy as art. Seeped in black writing ink, the ewers also reference traditional Chinese water painting, and more broadly, the act of writing itself – of recorded, forgotten and unknown stories.

Decant is thematically rich and invites the viewer’s interaction from many different, even competing, angles. But essentially, the work invokes a personal engagement with its materiality, forms, subject matter and the physicality of the space. Indeed, the success of Decant is derived from the surreal experience of being within the work’s artificial landscape, which strangely seems natural nonetheless. Fries has presented a site where art intermingles easily with remnants of the everyday, prompting us to consider the overlooked fragments – tangible and otherwise – which shape our own daily experiences.

Vi GirgisFreelance Arts Writer and Acting Producer Public Programs and Education at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre

1. Stephen Gapps, ‘Cabrogal to Fairfield City, A history of a multicultural community’, 2010 1. Germano Celant, ‘Arte Povera: Notes for a Guerilla War’ in Flash Art, no. 5, 1967.

Decant

Fairfield City Museum & GalleryOpen: Tues - Sat 10am - 4pmFREE ADMISSIONCnr. The Horsley Dr & Oxford St,Smithfield NSW 2164www.livingmuseum.com.auP: 02 9609 3993 E: museumgallery@fairfieldcity.nsw.gov.au

Designer: Ye WinPhotographer: Mim StirlingArtist: Kath Fries www.kathfries.com

All images: Kath Fries, Decant, 2014. Ewarthenware paper clay, ink, mirrors, perspex, water, wire, found materials, sound and video projection. Total installation dimensions 6.2 x 7.27 x 19.12m