Take a Look: Anita Johnson Larkin’s Exhibition - ‘Come to Me without a Word’
Anita Johnson Larkin, Sleeping Breath (from the Breath repair series), 2020, performance: Breath repair, photograph by Bernhard Fischer, 80 x 280cm. Image courtesy of Anita Larkin.
We have a terrific new exhibition to share with you. TBSSS friend and guest teacher Anita Johnson Larkin, currently has a solo exhibition on at Wollongong Art Gallery titled Come to Me without a Word. Abandoned and collected objects are combined with felt, beeswax, honey and lead in Larkin’s artworks offering themselves up as intimate poetry of love, longing and loss. Chairs, ladders, crutches, hot-water bottles, violins and beds, can be seen to stretch, slump, climb, smell of cloves, wrap themselves in the warmth of felt or emit the sound of bees.
“My art practice focuses on our relationships with familiar objects and how they are connected to feelings of longing, invoke memory and explore language, place, and the feminine. I see salvaged objects to be akin to a type of shorthand material language, as they can instantly connect us to complex memories of events and emotions beyond words, discussing complex socio-political issues in a poetic way. The objects I use in my artworks are salvaged from the tip or the verge, and are originally from the domestic realm of the home. They have an intimacy with the human body, many are prosthetic sense objects in which our sense of boundary of the self is lost within the object. Chairs, tables, hot-water bottles, crutches, ladders, beds, cots, hand-tools, gloves, shoes and musical instruments, such objects can be strong sites of longing, fear, desire, loss and identity. I also like to play with language and the terminology of objects, to alter how we perceive a thing.
I am interested in alternative understandings of repair as opposed to restoration to former wholeness and utility. I make visible my gestures of repair toward broken objects and purposefully employ materials that have a reference to the human body materially. Felt, hair, wax and textiles, embody the object. I like to play with the curious suggestion that objects could be imagined to have parallel lives and hardships to our own. I repair them into new autonomous objects, free to leap across the room, to play, to retaliate, to be other than they are expected to be, to go beyond their object hood. The ordinary object becomes a psychological object, the uncanny.” Anita Johnson Larkin
Click here to watch a very insightful interview with Anita on her exhibition.
Anita Johnson Larkin
Come to Me without a Word
29 August - 11 October
Wollongong Art Gallery
Image credit, clockwise from top left: The bridge between you and me, 2018, salvaged objects, silk, 250 x 200 x 50cm. Top right: Come to me without a word, 2019, unfinished violins, felted wool, 120 x 24 x 12cm. Bottom right: Beneath the weight of the sheets, 2019, salvaged chairs, sheets, blanket, lead and beeswax, 85 x 125 x 45cm. Bottom left: Breastrumpet, 2019, trumpet, felted wool, 24 x 11 x 32cm. All photographs by Bernhard Fischer and images courtesy of Anita Johnson Larkin.