The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
floe, a hovering, flat-bottomed bank of glass storm cloud (or, indeed, a mountain range of glass)—assorted glassware plates and
bowls, shimmering about five feet above the gallery floor—is the most recently exhibited facet of Nicholas Folland’s work. Like those other facets floe elicits wonder and creates disorientation. It has enormous éclat—seeming both quietly thunderous and brooding and at the same time to be an oddly frozen moment. Is the glass falling, falling but suddenly arrested?
floe was perhaps the standout work in the Samstag Museum exhibition, ‘Colliding Worlds’ (15 May–24 July 2009), and it was amongst strong competition alongside works by Patricia Piccinini, Hayden Fowler, Shaun Kirby, Pia Borg, and an Anna Platten tour de force. floe was shown to particular advantage: at one end of the gallery but visible from the entrance, it hung from the immensely high ceiling. It had visual impact and mystery. What was it and how could it be? Drawn to this phenomenon the viewer, moving closer, could admire the sureness and detail of the work and puzzle at the mechanics. In the context of Folland’s other work floe has other and deeper resonances. This context is made up, in particular, of two exhibitions, Doldrum at the Experimental Art Foundaton in 2005 and a solo spot at Greenaway Art Gallery in October/November 2008.
Folland would seem to work with, and to think through, two modes, an involvement with a specific chosen material and class of object and an alertness to their connotations and cultural meaning. These last can be the culturally purposed meanings borne by the objects and the meanings they acquire by association and through their social history... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline