Two specific objects, a tautological pair. Have you seen the painting recently? No, I haven’t. Maybe it’s better that way, that you haven’t seen it. Screws are drilled in – approximate. They can’t go in any further – the sound of timber under pressure. Charlie traces a right angle on a big plank of pine clamped to a dolly. These will sit between large panels of plywood repurposed from an Australian Open tennis stand – originally painted Australian Open blue. Salvaged materials from a junkyard as far up Sydney Road as you can go. The internal structure has been built once before, it has been rehearsed. Yet it takes exactly two people to prop it up, hard to hold. Lidia has finished pushing screws into the wood, it stands on it’s own. Half done and erect – totally symmetrical arches. The top-heavy wave crashes over a perfect cross section etched into the concrete floor. Flexible veneer conceals the skeleton, painted a darker shade of teak that matches the lower half of the surrounding gallery walls, a seamless extension of space. Everything lathered in linseed oil. Slabs of teak also line the side of the box that contain the painting suspended on the wall: built in. Precise. Unlike the surface of the painting itself – irregular. Bigger than a wingspan, also salvaged from scraps. Australian modern painterly marks decorate the solid rectangles, interrupted by haphazard diagonals, two tall towers, newly painted with thick black around the edges, hold residual saw-dust. Overlaid with roughly white circles on the battered board. Barely perceptible smear of dirty pink and sky blue in the middle of the painting – a depression in the surface of the board, concave and minor height. Larger than a bird bath. Aluminum alloy Jhansi tray and mirror small, round indentations that form various concentric circles. Set into the painting, within the box fixed onto a makeshift stand strung to the real wall behind, pulled back by blue straps that prevent it from falling forward.
Words by Stacey Collee.
Documentation by Claudia Saballa-Hobbs
Lidia and Charlie’s collaborative sculpture practice seek to question value systems and the hierarchy of cultural materials.