06 July – 31 August 2011
iArt Gallery 71 Loop Street
With ‘towards an architecture of loss’, Beth Diane Armstrong has produced a series of works that sit in direct dialogue with her most recent exhibition ‘to skip the last step’, the two bodies of work operating in conjunction to explore the concept of traversal and surmounting of loss.
The 27 engravings and 5 sculptures that comprise ‘To skip the last step’ are a direct chronicle of Armstrong’s experience of the loss of a loved one. Created in the few months afterwards, they can be seen as a documentation of the initial sense of loss. Within it, Armstrong described feeling like she’d skipped the last step; that something in the space of mourning, a loss, was amiss. As a result, the image of the staircase became increasingly important as a representation of transition; the moving from one space to another.
In ‘towards an architecture of loss’ Armstrong has isolated this motif of a staircase and used it as a means to navigate between the two bodies of work. However, as is suggested in the work of M.C. Escher for instance, traversing a staircase can be an ambiguous gesture imbued with a sense of relativity and lacking a discernable ‘up’ or ‘down’. Mimetic of this ambiguity of state, the staircase image has been reconfigured and abstracted in this new body of work into large scale line drawings and flat wire sculptures. They move away from their recognizable form and instead suggest scaffolding or perhaps exoskeletons.
Within the delicate line drawings of the engravings in ‘To skip the last step’, the personal interior spaces feel comforting in their familiarity, yet empty in their simplicity of line and absence of the figurative. The viewer shifts focus, to the expanse of white paper, to the negative spaces, and finds absence. The lines and words are like scaffolding, the ‘assist’, the ‘crutch’ for Armstrong’s representation of loss, and it is apt then that when one attempts to look behind the scaffolding, all that one can see is the structural phantasm of an inexpressible loss.
Evidenced within ‘towards an architecture of loss’ is the scaffolding itself coming to the fore. Scaffolding fundamentally serves a constructive role; it facilitates building, repairing and cleansing. There is something functional in demarcating and drawing the boundaries around emptiness. There is no longer anything that traces the loss, nothing that hinges the work on the personal. Instead the staircases have transformed into scaffoldings and the scaffoldings have in turn become abstracted forms. What is inside them is nothing. As such, removed from their role as a support structure they continue to exist instead as phantasmal exoskeleton, a displaced architecture of loss.
View the works
View the complete works from ‘to skip the last step’