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The Tin Sheds are hosting simultaneous exhibitions of work by two artists whose perspectives converge. By divergent means, each of them transforms the everyday surfaces of specific utilitarian and communal spaces into striking formal images that lead to speculation on the nature and spirit of place.
Nicole Ellis lifts the imprints and residues from marked wooden floors in a new series of hanging works which reveal the material traces from past and present histories laid down on old industrial floors. The grainy surfaces and time-muted colours that have accumulated gradually over the years and through different uses, have been captured in the layers of acrylic paint used to lift the delicate accretions from the floorboards. The paint skins are finally spliced together on loose pieces of canvas and combined into medium and large-scale works.
Part archaeology, part painting and print, these hybrid works recall the built environment and the active life of industrial spaces: the shearing shed, clothing factory and artists' studio. The surfaces are found, their marks made accidentally by innumerable and anonymous others. Lifted from the floor, the resulting paintings present another form of image-making, one that creates from the patina of everyday lives, an immediate and tactile space of formal beauty and conceptual resonance.
Charles Cooper's paintings portray changes in the nature of road markings, usually at intersections and crosswalks.
In this exhibition his work focuses on streets that approach or traverse Sydney's inner- city neighbourhood known as the Block. Zig- zag warnings overlie earlier yellow and white diamonds, pedestrian plateaux appear and disappear in response to changing policy and, all the while, weather and usage erode the paint used continually to refresh- or alter- these signs.
Spanning the decade since his occupancy of a studio in Darlington, oil paintings on canvas and wood- panel trace Cooper's evolving approach in interpreting such markings as forms of genius loci, mute witnesses to flux.
