Working across installation, sound, and performance, Brooke Ferguson explores the complex relationship between representational and abstract visual languages. Central to these explorations is the emphasis on drawing as both a formal and conceptual process that enables other creative possibilities to emerge through sound or performance works. Refrain/Reprise is the result of Ferguson’s Melville Haysom Memorial Arts Scholarship project and marks the first exhibition of her abstract drawings, bringing together a selection of works from several larger archives produced between 2013 and 2016. Chance-based strategies and everyday objects form the basis of these compositions that, while alluding to specific events, evade representational readings.
Refrain Reprise No. 1-90 (2014-2016) consists of a series of drawings produced by dropping different objects, such as tape, onto a page and then tracing their outline. Sometimes these silhouettes are simply outlines of the objects they trace. At other times, they appear as densely shaded, overlapping forms. This lends the drawings the impression that they are at various stages of completion, enabling a more open engagement between the works and the viewer. These strategies were strongly informed by George Brecht’s use of everyday and readymade objects in his systematic explorations of chance as a method for creating works. Brecht’s ‘event scores’ provide a framework for elucidating previously disregarded elements of everyday perceptual experience by allowing these experiences the same attention afforded to art.
Although Ferguson’s works appear abstract, they are strongly connected to external referents and visual cues. No. 1-20 (2013-2014) consists of a series of drawings of twisting, ribbon-like forms. As a document of the artist’s recollections of the ash from burning sugar cane caught in the wind that she experienced growing up in North Queensland