Strawberry Thief and Anxiolytic
Solo exhibition for Tolarno Galleries at Melbourne Art Fair
2 – 5 Aug 2018
Performance in collaboration with bartender Cennon Hanson
This multi-dimensional project encompasses a wallpaper print, a series of collage prints, hand-carved wooden sculptures and performance Anxiolytic.
The walls of the Tolarno stand will be covered in the wallpaper print, Strawberry Thief (after William Morris). Playing on the double meaning of ‘taste’, Willing evokes the good taste of 19th century arts and crafts home furnishings, but replaces English flora and fauna with Australian natives. A nod towards the contemporary taste for wild food and foraging for indigenous ingredients now popular with avant-garde chefs, Willing photographed macadamias, bunya nut, lilly pilly, Moreton Bay Bug, and finger lime. These images were overlaid on the original William Morris Strawberry Thief design to recreate the elegant symmetrical pattern. This wallpaper forms the foundation for the whole installation.
Dark (series #1-5) is the next iteration of Willing’s fondly described ‘blob collages’. The work of countless hours of cutting and assembling, not to mention the time spent riffling through op shops to acquire hundreds of 1970s cookbooks, Dark celebrates the festive and ceremonial fruit cake. Heavy with ritual and nostalgia, Willing explains, “The absurdity of the fruitcake tradition, particularly at Christmas-time in Australia, and its laborious cooking process, is amplified through the obsessive process of these collages. They tend to have an architectural feel, and close-up we might lose ourselves in the rich moist fruitcake, the delicate garnishes, or the Escher-like winding staircases of fruitcake slices. From afar the collages form unruly continents, mounds of cooked meats, the scatological, or bunches of dried flowers.”
Dark refers to a quote from Margaret Visser’s The Rituals of Dinner (1991). “Festive food is both out of the ordinary, and (if the festival is a reoccurring one) always the same. Dried fruit mixes require long hard work in the making and ‘maturing’ of them: time taken in the preparation of festival foods is part of the value attributed to them... There is a tendency, also, to associate very dark food, such as coffee, chocolate, truffles, caviar, and crepes, as well as plum cake, with excitement and luxury… We are eating cultural history and value as well as family memories.”
Traditional Scottish shortbreads are made from pressing the sweet dough into wooden molds. In two hand-carved sculptures, Umber (no.1) and Umber (no.2), Willing carves newly evolved forms into recycled Australian hardwood lumber sourced from demolished houses. Drawing from biological and organic imagery – fossils, bodily organs or bacteria – they also function as decorative biscuit shapes. Much like the inherent afflictions into the timber – timber knots, borer marks and nail holes – Willing’s additions into the timber sculptures are parasitical.
One carving will lie on the floor, reminiscent of minimalist sculpture, the other is to be placed upright as a vertical drinking bar – contrasting cold minimalism with the warmth of a functional piece of furniture designed for hospitality.
This sculpture bar hosts the performance, Anxiolytic. Its props are a bottle of vodka tincture and drinking glasses. Artist bars that have influenced Willing here include Erwin Wurm’s Drinking Sculptures and Tom Maroni’s The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art.
At the Melbourne Art Fair, audiences will be invited to participate in the Anxiolytic cocktail performance. A collaboration between Elizabeth Willing and mixologist Cennon Hanson, Willing has naturalised the valerian plant in her Brisbane garden and made homemade tinctures – seeping the roots in vodka for several months – to form the cocktail base. Hanson has created the cocktail receipe using other ingredients with links to medicinal tonic and foraged herbs: vermouth, brandy, a bitter herbal liqueur and a clove oil with analgesic properties to rim the glasses, to lightly numb the lips.
The cocktails will be sipped from Pacify glasses. A thin, fragile glass, Pacify is made from an altered laboratory beaker. A tiny hole is pierced on one side. When the cocktail is poured into the glass, the liquid weeps very gently from the hole, like tears. Participants must stem the flow with a finger, to comfort, soothe, pacify the glass in its state of loss. The cocktail has a direct connection with fingertip and mouth, creating a full circle of pacification.
- Press release, Tolarno
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
