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‘A History of Forgetting’, currently on display at the Tweed Regional Gallery and Margaret Olley Art Centre in Australia continues artist Alex Seton’s interrogation of the unreliability of memory, both personal and collective. The exhibition, themed on delving into memory and its unreliability, is a manifestation of the artist’s love for his childhood. The solo exhibition that will remain on display until 17 April 2022, is an ode to the place of his upbringing and the stories that people have collectively become oblivious to with the passage of time. The installations are a blend of photography, video work and new marble carvings alongside an original musical work, all of which harmoniously paint a picture for the viewers depicting the poignant and often humorous reflections on the fallibility of memory.
Alex Seton is a multidisciplinary Australian artist whose works traverse across sculpture, photography, videos and art installations. Best known for the use of marble carving and the employment of traditional techniques to create designs and art that ascribe to contemporary sensibilities, he is one of Australia’s leading sculptors. Through his art, he examines the problematic concepts and conjures them into a form. Seton contemplates ideas and questions of nationhood, conflict or the problematic relationship between individual and the society. His work dominantly displays the clash between personal and cultural through an intricate relationship between form and substance. His work and artistic language engaging with the contemporary audience moves in tandem with his concepts of exploring and interrogating history.
His work reiterates his belief: what a culture values is what it chooses to memorialise but its deepest anxieties are hidden in the oblivious. Through his art, he pays homage to stories known and unknown, remembered and forgotten. One such intricate marble sculpture is ‘The ghost of Wombeyan’ which was the centrepiece of the exhibition ‘Meet Me Under the Dome.’ The eerie-looking sculpture art has strong connotations if looked at closely. The ‘Ghost’ is a metaphor for the childhood memories of a marble quarry near Wombeyan Caves, where the artist resided with his family from the late 1980s. The sculpture was created from marble sourced from the same caves, the place where Seton first became interested in stone carving, beginning his remarkable journey of sculpting at the age of eight.
Seton’s love for his childhood landscape and its memories is conspicuous in installations like ‘Bunbun contemplates nostalgia as a toxic instinct’ which was in remembrance of his favourite toy, BunBun the rabbit and a ladder built by his father using the mathematical concept of the golden ratio. In every installation of his, he poses the onlookers with a conflicting thought in the skin of nostalgic comfort.
The Tweed Regional Gallery & Margaret Olley Art Centre is housed in a large, modern, architecturally award-winning building with views to Mount Warning. The gallery was established on this site in 2004 and was extended in 2006, surrounded by beautiful lawns and stunning panoramic views of the Tweed river. The gallery also encapsulates six exhibition spaces, a workshop and education area, a cafe with indoor/outdoor seating, a souvenir store and research library.
The exhibition ‘A History of Forgetting’ will remain on display from February 11, 2022 to April 17, 2022 at the Tweed Regional Gallery and Margaret Olley Art Centre in Murwillumbah, New South Wales, Australia.
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