in conversation with Susan Rothnie
Sydney-based artist, Mikala Dwyer talks here with Susan Rothnie about the ideas which fuel her work processes and her enquiries into the nature of objects, materiality and relationships, and the vision which underpins her amorphous and intriguing sculptural installations.
Susan Rothnie: Your work has often been written about in terms of discourses, like Minimalism and Feminism. How relevant are they to what you're doing and how you work?
Mikala Dwyer: I think they become relevant after time, but it's not what I'm aiming at, or necessarily thinking about, when I'm working. That's the context it gets put into later by other people... I'm arguing with certain ideas of purity. But I'm not thinking in terms of 'Feminism' or 'Minimalism', but about ideas of essence, truth and purity. All those movements are part of your material language, going through art school, working around other artists, looking at art — all that language is around you, and you tend to talk where the materiality comes from. For a while I was quite in life interested in trying to work against what I saw as notions of purity and definition — which then goes into Formalism; so you end up becoming part of a discourse without intending to.
SR: Are you interested in aesthetics?
MD: I'm interested in taking seemingly beautiful things and trying to highlight their potential, their inherent ugliness. I'm probably more interested in ugliness: ugliness becomes beautiful. I see ideologies running behind forms and surfaces: some things might appear beautiful, but have quite sinister undercurrents. I look at all things in the world as kind of 'cooled ideas', as 'thinking' that has slowed down or cooled... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline