Out of Her Tree
The early works of Louise Haselton that I remember bore witness, over many years, to the life of the Australian Experimental Art Foundation’s (AEAF’s) administrative space. They hung there, decoratively and much loved, for the better part of a decade. Haselton’s sculpture had a natural enough home there—the artist had been the installation and demounting person at the AEAF for much of the early ’90s. And her work played with themes of materiality, and of opposed—or confounded or deliberately and ironically embodied—‘idea’. These were part of the lingua franca or leitmotif, the locus of commitment, perhaps, for much of the ongoing discussion that was the AEAF in those years. The works were liked for their unobtrusive jokiness, their decorative stability and aesthetic staying power.
Haselton’s history can suggest distinct bodies of work, and distinctly different impulses in operation. She went through Art School in Adelaide between 1987 and 1991. After a few years of the usual scuffle—teaching a little, working part-time, making art and exhibiting—the artist decamped to Canberra and then Melbourne. At RMIT she undertook a Masters—looking at the word in art and examining the works of Ian Hamilton-Finlay, Jenny Holzer, Bruce Nauman, Ed Ruscha, Robert Indiana: formal study of what was already her bent. In 2003 she returned to teach in Adelaide.
Haselton’s exhibition, ‘Five Different Homes’ (1993) dealt in the uncanny and idea-based. The physically looming and outré characterised that show, Louise Bourgeois ghosting in and out. Trickle (1993) serves as an example of this; a tower of white, fluffy-looking ball shapes. Each ball had an ‘eye’ to it, a small black disk (made in fact of feathers). The effect was jelly-ish and a tad icky... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Veto Group 1, 2011. Detail. From the Errand Workshop Exhibition, Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia.
Explanatory Gaps, 2014. Detail. Painted bronze, wool, studio detritus. Photograph Grant Hancock.
