That’s Just Rubbish: Candy Stevens / Haptic Biographies: Catherine Shields

That’s Just Rubbish: Candy Stevens / Haptic Biographies: Catherine Shields

This combined exhibition explores feminist ideas surrounding women and notions of domesticity and nurturing, reflecting on how we shop, consume, dress and dispose in a society that ‘packages’ women’s bodies and their roles in society.

As a medium, soft food packaging in particular is drawn upon to explore feminist ideas surrounding domesticity, the impact of womens’ return to work as well as the commodification or ‘packaging’ of women’s bodies.

Multidisciplinary artist Catherine Shields uses a variety of mediums and techniques to re-purpose found materials such as soft single use plastic, tin, fabric, hair and grasses to twist, sew and enmesh into new forms. Titles such as Entanglement, Enmeshed, Mother Lode, and Empty Nester suggest relations with others, including objects, the Earth, our bodies. Catherine continues to be passionate about the role of re-purposing and ‘making-do’ to speak about the complexity of of personal responsibility to the earth and to ourselves.

Sculptor, painter and installation artist Candy Stevens is also bent on recycling materials in her practice. Candy thinks that there is enough ‘stuff’ on the planet and so reinvigorates new from old. This at times extends to recycling her sculptures into new works. In the tradition of Arte Povera, creating works from everyday and discarded objects, her practice disregards power constructs and financial norms and becomes a meditation on the temporal and ephemeral nature of existence

That’s Just Rubbish will be open 11am-4pm from Saturday 11 – Sunday 25 May.