This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Nicholas Folland's Domestic Distractions

Nicholas Folland is based in South Australia, and has been recently announced as participating in the 2012 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. Sourcing chandeliers, crystal ware and antiques from garage sales, op shops and online auctions Folland stages complicated arrangements of found items, and in his exhibition Domestic Distractions employs light and movement to strong effect.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="565" caption="Nicholas Folland: Tools (2010)"][/caption]

Folland’s attention to detail is worthy of attention, the brass hanging system of Tools giving what could be an intimidating installation a clinical, passive appearance, like a coleopterist’s drawer. The knives themselves are remarkably unique, some malformed by repeated sharpening. The names crudely engraved into the handles are sobriquets, including ‘Baz’ and ‘Andy’. This both softens the threatening nature of the knives by lending them an informal personality and serves as a conceptual twist – the owner’s proper names have been ‘cut’ – David becomes Dave, Deborah has become Debby.

There are interesting contradictions that link works in the show. In the work Goodnight Sweetheart the artist renders half of symmetrical crystal structures unable to carry out their luxurious light-reflection by wrapping them in cinefoil. In Untitled (Home Renovation) a doily sits on the table as if to protect its surface from the crystal ware, which hovers millimetres above. The tables is elsewhere irreparably cut, two circular holes have been sawn through which the remaining two crystal elements hang. Doilies reappear in Stuart Crystal Decanter and Two Matching Glasses, and Large Stuart Crystal Comport and Two Dessert Bowls, again seemingly protecting the surface of two unlikely tables, shelves supported by finely lacquered branches found in the artist’s neighbourhood. On the doilies sit the recombined materials of the works’ titles, melted down and recast into elemental, almost cartoonish representations of natural crystal. Folland reveals the fallacy behind crystal ware – while having the appearance of cut glass, crystal ware is made by setting melted liquid stone in moulds with deep grooves. Folland’s moulds lack the deep patterns that allow the illusion of cut glass, and his process mars the clarity of the material. In fact the reflections of light on the gallery wall behind the work are of the shelves’ lacquered veneer, the recast items' matt surface absorbing the light.

While the tableware in the Stuart works has been recast literally, the tableware throughout the exhibition has been re-cast figuratively. The collections of crystal ware, once symbols of economic strength and domestic refinement in good homes, have presumably been donated to thrift stores by their original owners, deeming them too good to throw away, but not valuable enough to keep. Although perhaps an over-popular source of exhibition material, particularly in Australia’s art schools, op shop ephemera occupies an actually quite complicated economic site, one which Folland encourages us to consider.



Untitled from Ryan Renshaw on Vimeo.

Twelve years ago M.A. Greenstien described Folland’s objects as ‘bratty’, and his style ‘hip’, in her essay for the 1999 Samstag catalogue. Those descriptions have no real relationship to the work in Domestic Distractions, which is characterised by a considered, even sombre tone.

 
DOMESTIC DISTRACTIONS

Nicholas Folland

Ryan Renshaw, Brisbane

November 16 – December 10, 2011