cultural spaces
Wendy Teakel's recent exhibition, Cultural Spaces, at the Canberra Museum and Gallery, is the impressive result of a consistent evolution of theme and working process. Hovering delicately between the physical and the numinous, it fuses a richly seductive aesthetic with a subtle play of meanings, revealing itself slowly. The material evidence of the artist's environment is a constant presence, as trace, as tool, as artefact, as symbol. The corrugated iron, chicken wire and star pickets are the artefacts of rural life. The structural devices of tensioned wire and crossed pickets are the sound but provisional methods of making do with what is to hand. The pokerwork inscriptions in the paintings are made with the scraps of wire and metal detritus of a farming environment. Teakel's sculptural works are always more than they seem, creating an inferred space within the gallery walls. They are sites which invoke other sites, journeys which extend beyond the boundaries of the work itself. In Hills and Valleys the corrugated iron presents a profile of range and valley, suggests an archetype of shelter, hints at the transcendence of the arch. lt has both the intimacy of a child's cubby house and the long view of a much-loved landscape. Respite consists of a line of chicken-wire tree-guards, voluptuously and playfully feminine, supporting a trough of tea and sugar in a gesture which implies the insertion of a domestic sensibility into the rural landscape. There is a quietly subversive humour in this piece, a chorus line of rural maidens bringing a ceremony of tea across the paddock. But they are transparent too, occupying their space lightly, the paddock visible through the filigree of wire. In Daily Traces, a