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Artbank tower take over by artist – Kate Scardifield
To celebrate Artbank’s 40th anniversary year, Artbank is pleased to announce a new acquisition to the collection. Kate Scardifield’s artwork Canis Major, 2019, will take over the 14 metre high tower space at Artbank’s Waterloo showroom.
To be launched in November alongside Artbank’s anniversary exhibition 20/20: 40 years of Contemporary Australian Art, this new addition to the Artbank collection celebrates the important role Artbank has played in supporting emerging, Australian contemporary artists and celebrating the dynamic and diverse landscape of the Australian arts sector.
Kate Scardifield is one of the most exciting artists working in contemporary textiles in Australia, recently being awarded the prestigious Eva Breuer Travelling Art Scholarship from the Art Gallery of NSW.
Canis Major marks a significant point in the development of Scardifield’s practice. The work is an outcome of a major research and development project funded by the Australia Council and supported by a residency at Bundanon Trust.
The work Canis Major takes its name from a constellation of stars best seen from the Southern Hemisphere. The work is referred to by the artist as a ‘wind instrument’, an adaptable textile sculpture previously ‘deployed’ in performative activations which saw the artist use the sail as a transmission marker in the landscape, generating a sequence of shapely poetic gestures and fieldwork recordings.
The artist is fascinated by the idea of ‘reading the wind’ and imagines these soft sculptures as instruments for navigation. The sculpture transforms wind into a material state, giving shape to atmospheric conditions; what would otherwise be imperceptible is given form. Their scale and colour also allude to signalling across distances. This work marks a major achievement in the artist’s practice as she develops her ideas of form, materiality and textile on a large scale.
The artwork will be displayed first in the Artbank tower, and then made available to the public via Artbank’s leasing program.
