Heide Education
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HEIDE EDUCATION Exhibition dates: Saturday 15 March to Sunday 13 July 2014 Venue: Heide III, Central Galleries Curator: Sue Cramer Emily Floyd Far Rainbow 2013 Pigment print on paper 35 x 36cm Courtesy of Anna Schwartz Gallery Melbourne and Sydney This Education Resource has been produced by Heide Museum of Modern Art to provide information and support school visits to the museum and as such is intended for this use only. Reproduction and communication is permitted for educational purposes only. No part of this education resource may be stored in a retrieval system, communicated or transmitted in any form or by any means. ©Heide MoMA 2014 Educational use only Page 1 of 34 HEIDE EDUCATION Emily Floyd has been a practicing artist for fifteen years, during which time she has achieved widespread critical acclaim for work that intrigues because of its seemingly effortless conflation of intellectual pursuit with innovative sculptural play. Conceptual rigor and highly refined material resolution are distinguishing features of Floyd’s practice. Drawing on an array of literary, artistic and political histories and disciplines, Floyd’s objects and images promote a broad, cross generational social engagement with contemporary culture through art ‘Emily Floyd: Far Rainbow’ is a survey exhibition that draws selectively from the last ten years of Floyd’s career and also presents several new works made specifically for this exhibition at Heide. Floyd looks at themes of utopianism and community, while simultaneously exploring how some theories of learning and alternative education might be applied to contemporary art, or articulated through the art object. Jason Smith Director and CEO Heide Museum of Modern Art Emily Floyd: Far Rainbow 2014 installation view Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne Photograph: Christian Capurro 2014 Please note: pages 2-21 of this education resource have been extracted from Cramer, S. (ed), Emily Floyd: Far Rainbow, exh. cat., Melbourne: Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2014. ©Heide MoMA 2014 Educational use only Page 2 of 34 HEIDE EDUCATION Emily Floyd borrows her title for this exhibition from a 1963 Soviet science-fiction novel set on planet Rainbow, an imaginary location inhabited by a utopian community of artists and scientists. Floyd is inspired by visionary thinkers and their proposals for a better society and her art draws on several historical and contemporary examples. In this exhibition, she focuses on the world of learning and the child, using it to explore broader ideas about feminism, community and social radicalism. Her sculptures—‘philosophical toys’ as she calls them—build on a rich twentieth- century history of infant education and its relationship to modernist art. They use the simple geometry and bright colours of children’s wooden toys and blocks—like those made in the tradition of innovative architect and educationalist Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) or by women artists at the German-based Bauhaus school of modernist art and design (1919–1933). Like them, Floyd values experimentation and play as foundations for learning and making art and for building a positive future. Floyd incorporates a wide variety of manifestos and speculative texts into her art through the use of letters and words in sculptural or printed form, or as patterned engraving on assemblages. Some works are engraved with the URLs of community, activist and theoretical websites, in recognition of the digital realm as a space for exchanging ideas. Floyd also borrows from the abstract language and typography of Russian Constructivist art as a reminder of the utopian aspirations of that early modernist movement, while political posters and radical publications of the 1970s and 1980s further provide her with a wealth of visual and conceptual material. Enlivened by the spirit of these activist traditions, Floyd’s works offer open-ended propositions that might help us navigate the complexities of contemporary life, and which ask us to consider what makes a good and productive society. Emily Floyd: Far Rainbow 2014 installation view Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne Photograph: Christian Capurro 2014 Emily Floyd refers to this room as the ‘straw room’ in reference to the seagrass floor-covering which, for many people, evokes memories of the 1970s. Among the wooden sculptures and assemblages there are ©Heide MoMA 2014 Educational use only Page 3 of 34 HEIDE EDUCATION also elements that recall the atmosphere of a playroom, including a small children’s chair made for Floyd in the 1970s by her toymaker father. The earthy colour and texture of the straw matting also provides a visually suggestive setting for works that allude to gardens or to working in the fields; for instance Gleaners (2012) in which two figures bend toward the ground. Their rounded forms recall the rural women scavenging for grain in Jean-François Millet’s social realist painting The Gleaners (1857). Three of the sculptures displayed here make reference to community gardens: Garden Sculpture (2012) echoes the spiral form of hanging garden ornaments; Organic Practice (2012) depicts the garden’s harvest and arrival at market; and Sun and Star Sculpture (2012) suggests the rhythms of night and day essential to the garden’s growth. Emily Floyd Sun and Star Sculpture 2009 synthetic polymer paint, ink and beeswax on wood (Huon pine and cherrywood) 140 x 140 x 10 cm ©Heide MoMA 2014 Educational use only Page 4 of 34 HEIDE EDUCATION Emily Floyd Organic Practice 2009 cardboard, wood (kota, Huon pine, beechwood, New Zealand kauri) 60 x 61 x 40 cm Offering a vivid parallel to our own planet under threat, the story of Far Rainbow, and Floyd’s optimistic re-telling of it, introduces themes explored in this exhibition. Utopian thinking of various types, both historical and current, is a continual source of inspiration for Floyd and a constant subject of her art, whether the utopian socialism of visionary industrialist Robert Owen (1771–1858) that accomplished the beginning of infant schooling in Great Britain— the basis of a major new work in this exhibition—or the radical tradition of anarchist ‘free-skools’, begun within early modernism and still current today—as signposted by her sculpture of the Anarchist symbol Gen-Existential Crisis (2006). The kindergarten too is a foundational concept of Floyd’s sculptures, which are informed by the basic geometries and primary colours of the wooden toys and learning tools used within Waldorf educational methods. These were based on the pedagogical theories of architect and Anthroposophist Rudolf ©Heide MoMA 2014 Educational use only Page 5 of 34 HEIDE EDUCATION Steiner, whose innovative education approach, developed around 1919, promoted learning through play and the belief that a child’s education should have a foundation in geometry. Such interest has its roots in Floyd’s family life: her father and grandmother were toymakers who made wooden toys influenced by traditional European and Eastern Bloc folk toys and by Bauhaus, Russian Constructivist and De Stijl handmade toys. As children, Emily and her brother spent time in their father’s workshop helping with simple tasks, an experience that helped shape the underlying principles of her art. Emily Floyd: Far Rainbow 2014 installation view Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne Photograph: Christian Capurro 2014 Emily Floyd describes her exhibition at Heide as being ‘anchored in the world of the child and learning’ and in ‘childrens’ perceptions of space’. The rooms within it reflect her growing interest in alternative theories of teaching and learning, and how they might be applied within contemporary art, while also encompassing broader themes like feminism, community, and social radicalism and their contribution to modernist art and its envisioning of future worlds. Floyd finds her subject matter in the cultural rather than natural landscape and her work is distinctive for the way it ranges across a remarkable diversity of fields, from visual art to literature, social theory to philosophy, permaculture to graphic and architectural design. Her materials are mostly organic (various timbers and beeswax for example) and she draws on the history of handcrafts like toy making, yet she is very much an artist of the digital age who makes constant and liberal use of the internet as a research tool. This enables her to follow idiosyncratic lines of enquiry, make connections between things and draw together the information and ideas that underpin her art. Signalling this, URLs are engraved into many of her wood sculptures and assemblages—of community, activist, creative commons and free dictionary websites, Wikipedia pages, for example—extending an invitation to viewers to take up and continue this research. ©Heide MoMA 2014 Educational use only Page 6 of 34 HEIDE EDUCATION Legacies of early twentieth-century modernism also underpin Floyd’s art, as seen in the abstract lexicon that underpins her work, but also her interest in avant-garde typographies and the aesthetics of protest and revolution reaching back to Russian Constructivism. Significant too are notions of a ‘useful’ art developed at the German-based Bauhaus school of art and design (1919–1933). The contributions of women artists at the Bauhaus to ‘minor’ practices such as toy making is of particular influence, notably that of artist and teacher Alma Buscher (1899–1944). Having been sidelined into weaving, considered appropriate work for women, Buscher argued her way into the Bauhaus wood-carving workshop creating objects that blur the lines between sculpture and toy, art and play. Buscher’s influence on Floyd’s work is evident in her artistic approach and design. Floyd often refers to her sculptures as ‘philosophical toys’. They are playful in appearance yet intended to provoke thought and stimulate learning and they tap into a rich history of infant education and its relationship to modernism. Some of Floyd’s sculptures are scaled-up versions of actual toys, notably Steiner Rainbow, which is based on a nine-part wooden toy inspired by Steiner’s educational ideas and used today in Waldorf schools, and Steiner Cave, a new work for this exhibition based on a similar, but cave-shaped toy.