Print and assemblage works by Glen Skien
Well known for his low key, resonant imagery investigating aspects of the human condition and social history through the prism of personal experience, Glen Skien utilises etching and drypoint with collage, extending at times into the three-dimensional. This grouping of works from 2012–2013 displays the artist’s considerable technical skill and the innovation that underpins his cross-referencing of motifs and ideas within a given space. The entire show pulses rhythmically through serial groupings that play with the basic premise of printmaking’s ability to replicate itself, yet without the necessity of creating an edition.
Instead Skien offers one-off sculptural assemblages and artist books, as well as wall-based works, to evoke a narrative of the self and a navigation of memory and past events, in a quietly insistent manner, while also raising questions about Australian identity. He follows the observation that ‘The past is foreign and historical understanding is not so much a recovery of the past as a mediation between our sense of ourselves and our sense of the past’.1
Skien’s bricolage technique and richly layered mark-making serve images that are evocative rather than descriptive. They obscure the familiar to invite reverie and speculation. Take, for instance, the free-standing object in the exhibition, with its attendant prints, based on an incident in Mackay’s history, that of the crash of a Fokker-Friendship F-27 passenger aircraft in mid-1962, vividly recalled by the artist’s mother. The accident happened at night not far from the family home and there were no survivors. For this object, Skien took the image of a suspended wing severed from the aircraft and hand built a scaled down structure combining strawboard and etching plates. His fabricated wing is a memorial
Glen Skien, Object-poem I: Trace, 2012. Strawboard and drypoint etching plates, variable size. Courtesy the artist.
Glen Skien, Letter from America I, 2013. Detail. Etching on muslin envelopes, collage and encaustic, 10 x 13cm. Courtesy the artist.
