A RE-Imagining of Being by Gail Hocking / Make Yourself Comfortable I by Brad Darkson
Gail Hocking
Gail Hocking graduated with a Master of Visual Arts (Research) from the University of South Australia in 2017. She completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) in 2014 at the same institution and a Bachelor of Visual Arts at Curtin University in 2007.
Hocking has exhibited widely, including: Depot Artspace, Auckland; Gallery-Smith, Melbourne; Faculty of Fine Arts Gallery of Lisbon, Portugal; Museu Municipal de Penafiel, Sao Luis, Portugal; SASA Gallery Adelaide and the Fremantle Arts Centre in Western Australia.
Academic Papers peer reviewed include Disturbing a Silent Voice -InASA Conference, Curtin University WA and FACTT, Lisbon Portugal.
“Why would we make ourselves continue when we can make ourselves anew?” – Kriti Sharma
A RE-imagining of Being explores the sensuous entanglements with what Gail Hocking describes as ‘non-human others’. Sharing her personal connection to objects, she explores a new visual language for a collective humanity. As we enter a new year, Hocking invites us to shed our preconceptions of what it means to be a human being in the world and turn out thoughts to our place in a new narrative.
Hocking grew up in New Zealand, and from her father she learnt how to listen, connect and converse to ‘other beings’. She learnt how to appreciate the lay of the land, be led by the scent of water, and connect with the echo of the wind in the trees. This strong affinity with the natural world, remains a constant inspiration and drive in her life, and her practice.
In this exhibition Hocking is lead by both new and familiar material processes, constructing found organic objects, including timbers, thorns, and seedpods to create new and unexpected sculptural forms. The works To Enter The New - An Uncomfortable Struggle with Fear and The Skins I Imagine to Inhabit use cast polyurethane that is stretched, carved, pierced and twisted to produce lightweight fleshy-toned sculptures reminiscent of our living insides laid bare. Recognising these flesh-like forms are present within us, Hocking is asking us to consider how they might relate to our life beyond what we already know to be real and true.
Inspired by Kriti Sharma’s “Make ourselves Anew: Towards a Radical Biology”, Hocking visually shapes ideas concerned with re-imagining the story of human beings. To redefine the narrative, she uses scale to create an intimacy with the works and draws us in. Crafting in copper electroplating, wood and bone she highlights the most miniscule of details from our surrounds, so often missed. Hocking wants us to stop and look and listen, surrendering to our senses and deepen our connections with organisms and others that we encounter everyday, in a new and different way. It is the unspoken spaces is a tangled sphere of Lycium, a variety of boxthorn, that shines almost vibrating with life. At first glance, it appears fraught with danger, but on closer inspection it is delicate and still. Hocking harnesses its power through a shadow play of dispersed light and darkness, encouraging us to move beyond our own fears and limitations and ultimately begin to unlearn our instinctual reflexes that dictate our attachment to an object. A RE-imagining of Being reminds us that the weight of the world is not heavy, it is wondrous, and it is ours to reconnect, re-imagine and re-explore when we are ready.
Erin Davidson
Erin Davidson holds the position of Project Manager at the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Gail Hocking, The Skin I Imagine to Inhabit I, (1 of 20) stained polyurethane, copper electroplated bone and wood, 13x7x3cm, photography Grant Hancock.
Gail Hocking, It’s The Unspoken Spaces (detail), Copper Electroplated Boxthorn, 35x27x24cm, photography Grant Hancock.
Brad Darkson
Brad Darkson (SA) uses various media including carving, sound, sculpture, multimedia installation, and painting with a regular focus on site specific works and reconnecting with culture. Current research interests include seaweed, surveillance, ritualised human behaviour, and the neo-capitalist hellhole we're all forced to exist within. Works are often informed by ties to his First Nations and Anglo heritage.
Recent exhibitions include Experimenta Life Forms (international triennial of media art) touring 2021 - 2024; Adelaide//International (group exhibition) Samstag Museum 2020; International Symposium on Electronic Art (South Korea) 2019; VIETNAM – ONE IN, ALL IN (Country Arts SA national exhibition) touring 2019 – 2021.
Brad Darkson exhibits objects of hostile architecture, lifted from our public spaces to reveal their cruel intentions and what is a systematic attack on vulnerable communities, the very communities who need public spaces. Often these objects are spikes, bars or rocks, strategically placed within public environments to make them inhospitable and deter certain people from utilising the area.
“These aggressive measures are part of the urban design strategy known as defensive architecture, or hostile architecture, and use elements of the built environment to restrict behaviours perceived as antisocial.’[1] It’s not just behaviours that are targeted, but also certain populations of ‘undesirable’ people, particularly homeless and transit mob, with hostile architecture being used to deter mob from sleeping or congregating in certain spaces. ‘Anti-social’ also extends to sports like parkour and skating, undesirable behaviour that could infringe on peace in the public domain.
Brad Darkson’s exhibition Make Yourself Comfortable I at POP Gallery focus on hostile architecture raises many questions about the intersections of capitalism, public spaces, housing and humanity. How we shape our public spaces to be only welcoming to certain people and for certain reasons, another way of reinforcing class hierarchies and pushing ‘the problem’ under the rug or better yet, out of this neighbourhood. There is great privilege in being able to use public spaces without a watchful gaze of authority, to be welcome to use it and even be oblivious to who is not welcomed. This is the power of hostile architecture, to be seamless yet effective, only evident to those it inconveniences. By exhibiting the piece the audience is forced to interact with their ugly truths, there is nowhere for the objects to blend in.
Hostile architecture is the result of when we see people as the problem, not the system or governments that cause people to be disadvantaged in the first place. It’s when we don’t create space to reflect the true needs for community, whether be a bed to sleep in or a halfpipe. It is when we prioritise private and corporate interests, when public space and park lands are being shaped and designed to prioritise the profits of another suit.
Hostility takes many forms, through architecture, government decision making, enforcement of law and within the attitudes the way we value each other as humans. Brad’s work is an act of truth telling, something gravely missing from our public spaces.
Essay by Dominic Guerrera
Dominic Guerrera is a Ngarrindjeri, Kaurna and Italian poet, writer and curator who lives on Kaurna Yerta.
[1] UNSW Sites. (n.d.). Defensive architecture: design at its most hostile. [online]
the arm of capitalism
is a force
that even the most vulnerable
are not spared from it weight
but yet we fail to see
they are vulnerable
because of capitalism
in the first place
Brad Darkson, Make Yourself Comfortable I (research location), 2022, digital photograph with post production, courtesy the artist.
Brad Darkson, Make Yourself Comfortable I (research location), 2022, digital photograph with post production, courtesy the artist.