Rose-Mary Faulkner

About the work

Listen to audio essay here

This recording acknowledges the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which these artworks and audio recording were made. I acknowledge Elders past and present and their contribution to keeping Country strong and healthy and ensuring that future generations continue to come together and tell their stories. 

This audio production features new public work by artist Rose-Mary Faulkner. This has been read by Liz Landford with words written by Rosalind Lemoh.

 

Essay: Spatial Encounters

It happens in moments, the ways our bodies press and connect, how soft boundaries bump up against the world.

Rose-Mary Faulkner’s suspended works gather, pressed together in the ways in which knees might crease or arms fold against the body. Her works tie across two sites, from the original traders block heart of the city of Verity Lane, to the new bustling street eateries on No Name Lane. ‘Spatial Encounters’ was developed as part of the Canberra Art Biennial of 2024 with a permanent installation of one work at No Name Lane. These large-scale works hang above you as you walk through the laneway spaces. Contrasting the old and the new these sculptural works draw from the human experience of connection through gathering.

Strung high, these works trace uneven, flat circular planes in acrylic, framed in aluminium and layered with a single neon ring line on each. These forms press against each other, carefully layered to respond organically to the hard architectural spaces and busy flickering signs of city lights. These works are subtle and organic, like the abstract expressions of bodies. These forms draw their line where bumpy edges define themselves against each other to come together and seperate.

The works for both sites echo the same forms, each clustered set responding to the surrounding colours of their site through opaque acrylics. The soft creams and browns at Verity Lane respond to the colours of the Sydney Building, an original site first started in 1927 whilst so much of the city was still the seed of a an imagining. Hanging soft between two buildings that shoulder the laneway, the light catches you. Walking through, the back entrances of shopfronts reveal raw graffitied walls and exposed pipes and air ducts. In a strange way, this through space creates a momentary gap, a small nestled pause between the roar of the interchange, and the loop of London Circuit. Inside, this tucked away urban secret offers street food and bustling laughter, filling the atrium like walls in the busyness of trading hours. Faulkner’s works hang, connecting the buildings like a pull to each, beckoning them to touch and defy their bricks and mortar that anchor them to the street below.

Whilst the work at Verity Lane warms to the colours and framed heritage archways of the Sydney Building, No Name Lane holds a single work in the centre. The laneway is in sharp contrast to the Sydney Building. The new black frames of the shopfronts and covered walkway create sharp geometries. The angled glass roof reflects down to the grey herringbone set pavers. Faulkner’s works change to the mood, pulling in black, roughened cement surfaces and sage greens still traced in the lyrical uneven circles that nudge together, like a tonal shift.

When we gather and connect, our pulse might quicken. Human connectivity sparks something that makes us not just individuals but a feeling of being greater than just yourself. As the gathering increases, this sensing of mingling movements sharpens, just as we sense the imminence of a storm through the electricity in the air. It’s that awareness of being in a throng, or the rush of crowds. That strange sensation of being a singular cell in a collective transformational merge with others. Familiar strangers pass, the blur of faces and bodies, milling, harried, day dreaming, working, wondering, together and seperate….

Faulkner’s works at both sites allow viewers to pass beneath them as they hover in the air to mark a kind of threshold. These laneways are like a crossing into liminal space. The liminal space, like a corridor in a house is that strange suspended space that is in-between, it is neither the beginning nor a destination but some kind of transition. To walk through liminal space, you might be processing the move from one state to another, or leaving something behind to walk in the present.  Changing through night and day, the laneways change from empty shopfronts and abandoned corners in the new morning of the day, whilst the afternoon whirring marks the preparation for the night that will continue, lit like magic, with golden strings of lights. At different times, the laneways become the centre, no longer a through space, but a space to gather. 

Faulkner’s works reflect on the idea of the body and pull you close. The edge that defines the outlines of her nestled circular forms, are struck with the light reflecting from the aluminium. This rhythmic edge, is like the window of light that the edges of your fingers hold when you are a child.  Do you remember seeing the world through binocular hands? Your fingers rounded, framing this light tunnel with yourself. No matter how hard you scrunch your eyes, you never see the distance properly, but what you can really see is the creases tracing the folds of your palm and your skin.  

These soft geometries, the bodies that we move in everyday, with thoughts and light, draw connections to the places that we go. We gather and bustle through the built architectures around us, travelling from old to new spaces, covering decades in a short walk, transitioning from night to day and back again. Faulkner’s works ask you to pause and look up, frame the sky and perhaps see that your imperfect edges connect to the world.

The creation of these works has generously supported by Morris Property Group and the City Renewal Authority. Canberra Art Biennial 2024 is supported by artsACT and Creative Australia.

 

 

While Rose-Mary primarily works with kilnformed imagery and glass, the 2024 Canberra Art Biennial provides the opportunity to expand her practice into the realm of public sculpture. Spatial Encounters is comprised of two companion artworks presented separately at two sites across the urban landscape of the City centre. An aesthetic relationship between the two artworks is perceived due to their form, compositional, and material similarity. Meaningfully, they speak to each other in the way they occupy and respond to their own specific sites. The acrylic forms and hand-bent neon, a subtle reference to the materials typically used in Rose-Mary’s glass practice, are a gentle gesture to the body. As the viewer moves their own body beneath the work, the sculptures interact with light and distance and the relationship of the space between the forms. Ever present in Rose-Mary’s practice is an enquiry into the way we see and experience the body. Spatial Encounters continues this pursuit, as Rose-Mary considers the way connection and relationships between people and places can be represented by objects and formations. Both artworks, with their soft, curved configurations, are specifically constructed to respond to their environments. Using materials and colours that correspond with the surrounding architecture (the neutrally toned buildings of Verity Lane, and the brutalist, assertive black and red of No Name Lane) Rose-Mary looks into the way the spaces we occupy and inhabit influence and nurture our experiences. Importantly, both laneways are places for meeting, where people encounter and interact with one another in moments of passing and gathering. As people do, both artworks are a contrast of organic forms nestled between the geometric rigidity of the architectural environments we inhabit.

image credits to the artist

About the artist

Rose-Mary Faulkner is a glass and print artist based in Canberra, ACT on Ngunnawal and Ngambri land. She graduated with first class honours from the Australian National University School of Art and Design in 2016 and since then has been working extensively to expand and develop her artistic practice as a studio tenant at Canberra Glassworks. Since graduating, her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including in the USA, Berlin, and Toyama, and has been acquired as part of the national glass collection at the Wagga Wagga National Art Glass Gallery. She has been included in multiple national and international prizes including the Hindmarsh Prize, Klaus Moje Glass Award, Megalo international Print Prize and the FUSE Glass Prize. Her practice primarily incorporates decals and imagery on glass, but recently as the 2023 Canberra Glassworks Emerging Mentorship recipient, has expanded to include neon. Rose-Mary works extensively as an educator and mentor for other artists and visiting artists to the Canberra Glassworks, including previously as a sessional teacher in the ANU Glass Workshop and more recently as a technical assistant for masterclasses in Australia and Pittsburgh, USA.