Simone Slee: Rocks Holding Up

Simone Slee: rocks holding up presented a suite of sculptural assemblages that continued Slee's ongoing investigation into the conceptual conditions and problems of sculpture. As with earlier works, she demands complicity from particular objects that she constructs and composes. Slee doesn't just make her materials the subject of art, in this case she expects her rocks and blown glass to reciprocally perform an action of propping or holding. The materials themselves became accomplices in her questioning of how things might be held up (and conversely held down).

While earlier smaller-scaled works could easily be manipulated, assembled and disassembled at the artist's whim, these new works perform a slightly differrent function. These sculptures are much larger, heavier and more unwieldy, requiring assistance to both make and manoeuvre. Although the sculptures are simply and sequentially titled 'Rocks holding up #3', 'Rocks holding up #4' etcetera, it appears in fact, that the glass forms are actually doing the work of pushing and supporting the rocks.

The materiality of these works certainly implies stability and permanency, however it is the suggestion of pushing and propping (and the immanent potential of failing and falling) that suggests these sculptures are actually the protagonists in some kind of

durational performance.