Queensland artist Donna Marcus is best known for her sculptures in public places from Saudi Arabia to China and all over Australia.
Brisbane audiences will know her as the artist behind the large spherical sculptures collectively titled Steam (2006) scattered through Brisbane Square at the top of the Queen Street Mall.
These sculptures are made from 7000 replicated cast aluminium vegetable steamers and, at any time of day or night, visitors may be seen recognising these materials and noting their transformation. In the evenings they radiate light.
The work of Marcus is now being celebrated in a major exhibition at HOTA Gallery on the Gold Coast called Donna Marcus: Radiate.
Artists become defined by their aesthetic – the way their work cleaves to particular materials, patterns or subjects. Why do artists make what they make? Sometimes this is explained, at least in part, through their biography or life events or through an exhibition such as this show which features a family story at its heart.
At the entry to this showing of 20 years work are two historic paintings, one by Australian modernist Roland Wakelin (1887-1971) and the second by post-impressionist Percy Lindsay (1870-1952). Both depict Berry’s Bay in Sydney Harbour and, in the Lindsay, a ship called SS Gabo is moored.
Marcus’s mother Thora lived on the Gabo from 1929 while her grandfather (and his team) gradually dismantled its metal fittings for sale. There’s a line-connect from that family narrative of reuse to the way Marcus has made her sculpture over the past 35 years.
Like her great-grandfather, Marcus has made obsolescence her business. “I had a sudden realisation of the possible genetic predisposition to scrap metal!” she says.
Throughout her career Marcus has salvaged old aluminium cookware, a collecting process to creating sculpture that use colour, repetition and patterning. There are many ideas at work.
In Radiate her materials are divided between those of modernism, aluminium and plastic, and the ancient traditions of ceramic and vitreous enamel. Her objects evoke domestic environments such as post-war kitchens and bathrooms, but also the industrial, including aircraft.
These realms, traditionally male and female, are recreated equal within the sculpture, with an inherent feminist undercurrent. Yet their poetic lyricism emerges from the assembly of colour and repetition (modernist tropes), the vibrancy of these objects from the past (which reflect, absorb or emit light) and their implied metallic musicality.
Marcus’s assemblage sees discarded objects become compelling in their ability to create new narratives.
Her recent constructions inspired by the Gabo family connection are eight silver/black aluminium works that are backlit. In their large scale and form they respond to Marcus’s mother’s memories of this time and an historic newspaper story about Thora’s life on board, which noted the domesticity suggested by lace curtains that adorned the vessel’s windows.
“I’ve always been interested in the link between small and large histories and intersections between the humble and the grand,” Marcus says. “My mother’s narratives around the Gabo were the starting point for the work but then uncovering the larger stories around Berry’s Bay during the 1930s became equally important.
“Objects and materials have unrelenting stories to tell. The bits from pressure cookers, coffee percolators, shower roses and all manner of perforated sieves assembled in GABO speak to the history of 20th century design and recall the aspirations of modernism.”
Three decades ago, when Marcus began assembling old kitchenware to make sculpture, this family narrative was far from the front of her mind. Only in the past 10 years has she explored this parallel, with GABO purpose-built to celebrate this legacy.
Finely cut in metal, the delicacy of lace is evoked in these works, all of which resonate with lively geometry, repetition of motifs and vibrancy that suggests the metaphysical qualities of stained glass. Dark, repetitive patterns, perforated with light, vibrate together like groups of atoms, celebrating the inexorable forces of which we are so rarely aware.
Get InReview in your inbox – free each Saturday. Local arts and culture – covered.
Thanks for signing up to the InReview newsletter.
This exhibition defines 20 years of practice since Marcus’s work was last profiled in a solo exhibition at the Gold Coast City Art Gallery in 2002.
It is a tightly curated survey, weighted toward recent work. In parallel to GABO (in scale) is her series of rooms each comprising 72 triangular saucepan lids in various colours, beginning with Parlour (1997), the oldest work in the exhibition, and concluding with Patio (2021).
The collecting regime that is central to Marcus’s practice is evident here, with the saucepan lids collected over 24 years. They provoke our understandings of changes since the mid-20th century, with rooms so differently understood in modern housing.
Marcus uses the familiar to draw us toward an exploration of the unknown. The interrogation of Marcus’s own biography is illuminating and surprising, yet makes perfect sense, an intriguing reminder of the permeability of the past.
Donna Marcus: Radiate, HOTA Gallery, Surfers Paradise, until April 28
hota.com.au
Support local arts journalism
Your support will help us continue the important work of InReview in publishing free professional journalism that celebrates, interrogates and amplifies arts and culture in South Australia.
Donate Here
