Simone Slee: Rocks holding up

Simone Slee's new suite of sculptural works Rocks holding up continues her 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 become accomplices in her questioning of how things might be held up (and conversely held down). 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.

*

All of the rocks included in these artworks have been sourced from licenced quarries located in Victoria, or gifted by current land owners from where the rocks were found. 

Simone Slee  acknowledges and thanks the VCA, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music at the University of Melbourne where she is the Head of VCA Art. She would also like to thank: the JamFactory, Adelaide, including the fabulous glass blowing team of Kristel Britcher, Drew Spanenberg, Alex Valero and Alex Hirst; Ellen Sayers for the beautiful plinth fabrication; John Clark and Ian Burns from Millennium Art Services; Miles Johnson, glass blower. And, as ever, with thanks to Louise Haselton, Coco and David Harley and the Slee family.