Simone Slee, Rocks holding up # 11, 2024. Sandstone (from the lands of the Eastern Maar/Gunditjmara) and glass, 41 x 72 x 26cm. Courtesy: the artist and Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne.

Simone Slee‘s new suite of sculptural works Rocks holding up continues her ongoing investigation into the conceptual conditions and problems of sculpture. As with earlier works, she demands complicity from particular objects that she constructs and composes. Slee doesn’t just make her materials the subject of art, in this case she expects her rocks and blown glass to reciprocally perform an action of propping or holding. The materials themselves become accomplices in her questioning of how things might be held up (and conversely held down). The materiality of these works certainly implies stability and permanency, however it is the suggestion of pushing and propping (and the immanent potential of failing and falling) that suggests these sculptures are actually the protagonists in some kind of durational performance.

All of the rocks included in these artworks have been sourced from licenced quarries located in Victoria, or gifted by current land owners from where the rocks were found.

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