SARA MACKILLOP

ALAENA TURNER

Furnished Space, Saturday 9 October

When an object is placed, the place is objectified: you can see both place and object. The object may blow out of the window, it may leak paint and become unstuck from the wall, or it may just sit.

A spool of tape looks functional on a table. Then on looking closer, this material appears more like ribbon than an item of stationery and its colour fades randomly from pale pink to white. Sara’s works are assembled from the chosen ephemera of keyrings, photocopies, receipts, typewriter ribbon and record sleeves. An act of placing and arranging opens them out to reveal latent shapes and colours. Here the fading of the tape gives evidence of a former history.

Thinking of a painting in the simplest terms as a thing made of paint, and with similar concentration toward material, object and surface, Alaena makes improvised constructions to allow paint to be displayed. In recent work, paint is poured into plastic containers, which are then stapled like stretchers. Inside these transparent vessels the paint is still wet and elastic, its weight moulding a loose shape and occasionally escaping in drips from the edges. The paint itself functions as an object whose colour and sheen are startling.

A painting is made that is all paint without brush or canvas or trace of the artist’s hand. While a roll of tape, sometimes colourful, sometimes colourless, may perhaps unwind a narrative. These invitations of looking can be at once casual and entirely fresh.