Nathan Beard, Lady Thiang (1952), 2022. Dibond mounted Giclée print on Hahnemühle Fine Art Pearl, Swarovski Elements each named using the antiquated term ‘Siam’ and Avery 3002 Blockout Vinyl Matt Laminate, 120 x 100cm. Courtesy: the artist and sweet pea, Perth.
sweet pea presents work from Jack Ball and Nathan Beard at this year’s Sydney Contemporary. Although both Jack Ball and Nathan Beard’s accomplished careers have developed in parallel – both are originally from Western Australia and are contemporaries from Curtin University – they have never exhibited together before now. Sydney Contemporary provides the perfect opportunity to articulate the strategies, techniques and sensibilities used across their practices. Both artists use collage, assemblage and alterations to archival images and personal collections as analogies for the construction of identity, exploring what is revealed and concealed in the accumulation of layers and reference points. They share a bold and rich use of colour and motif as well as approaches which balance the playful, libidinous and the severe in equal measures.
For Sydney Contemporary Jack Ball is presenting a photographic installation comprising works from the last four years of their practice. Conceived as a wall sized ‘drawing’ the work demonstrates the associative and textural thinking which underpins Ball’s practice. Images are poetically joined by similarities in texture, line, colour and mood. This process of joining builds an interplay of heat, body contact, adornment and surface through the accumulation and juxtaposition of many intimate photographic moments.
Nathan Beard presents a new series of collages and cast silicone sculptures collectively entitled Late Harvest, which draw upon the slippery experience of diasporic identity to explore family connection, temporal dislocation and the thickness of tropical time. Harvest consists of hand cut collages of enlarged 35mm photographs taken during the early early 2000s, depicting a garden of Thai fruit trees planted by Beard’s Aunt at her Perth state housing property. Tropical Flesh consists of silicone casts of tropical fruits, interspersed with casts of her hands and feet, which were moulded upon her permanent return to Thailand. Paralleling these visibly aged figurative elements alongside the rot and decay of fruits, which act as reliable markers of seasonal time within their tropical climate, the works act as a memento mori informed by the experience of witnessing family age in slices of time across a vast geographic distance.
