Weightless 2024

photo credit: Andrew Curtis

Flinders Lane Gallery 23 Apr - 11 May 2024

“Life imitating art; art imitating life,” Melinda Schawel muses, as she recalls nearly drowning when her raft flipped and she got sucked down a sink hole on the Snowy River, partway through making her new series, ‘Weightless.’ She describes sitting alone on a rock for an hour after the ordeal, contemplating the experience and feeling reborn. Perhaps, it is too neat to directly transfer this rhetoric of rebirth onto Schawel’s new series of works—yet there is experimentation and newness to be found there.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Schawel’s foray into ceramic works. “I've always wanted to go into that three-dimensional space, but I’ve been hesitant to take on the challenge,” Schawel confesses. Her bravery has been rewarded with an exquisite set of small porcelain works, which present a study in contrasts: the smooth, glazed, internal surface of the vessels in tension with their raw, jagged organic edges. Within the broader setting of the exhibition, these diminutive ceramics also exist in marked contrast to her larger paper works, as Schawel plays with scale, and shifts the relationship between the viewer and the artwork.

For Schawel—an artist who is known for her two-dimensional works—the ceramics might seem like a complete departure. After all, these works represent a move from the flat paper surface to the tangible form; from the graphic to the sculptural. Yet Schawel’s deep connections with paper persist in her porcelain, as its very materiality contains paper pulp. Upon further consideration, clay is an unsurprising choice given the malleability of its surface, which lends itself to Schawel’s sustained exploration and play with these material outer layers. Indeed, the initial inspiration for Schawel’s three-dimensional works came from clusters of curling, ripped paper scraps, which form the off-cuts of her flat paper works and, one suspects, would have been quickly thrown away by most artists. Schawel, however, found critical inspiration where others would see mere detritus.

Turning to the artist’s paper works, we find quintessential elements of Schawel in the lyricism of her mark making and the dynamism of her compositions. As Schawel moves through the world she notices patterns, collecting the subtle currents of life and transporting their essence into her works. In some moments, Schawel’s works are delicate and quiet and, in others, they wash over the viewer, threatening to engulf them.

Despite being made from paper, the works have a body and presence as they comprise weighty 640 gsm sheets. A selection of these pieces hang unframed in the gallery, off the wall, projecting out into the world and entering into the space of the viewer. In spite of their two-dimensional form, the works assume, here, something of a sculptural presence. The perforations that Schawel renders in her paper open up tiny windows for light to pass through, so that her work stages a play of light and shadow in the space that sits behind it.

Schawel has also painted the verso of some of her works in coloured ink. It is a subtle chromatic move, yet it has a profound effect: the rich colour on the back of the work creates a halo, which backlights the artwork and transforms the space around it. This is the poetic symmetry of Schawel’s work, which is not only affected by the world, but, in return, also touches the world back.

Tai Mitsuji @tai_mitsuji