Collaboration / Ruth Feeney
UNFILLED is the debut collaboration between emerging, Newcastle-based artists Ruth Feeney and Taryn Raffan. In a confident move, the artists present us with a singular installation - a tea stencil.
For both Feeney and Raffan, process is paramount. Over the course of six months and many shared cups of tea, the duo drunk, collected, air and oven-dried, ground and blended, tea leaves, to create the sifted stencil we see laid out before us.
Throughout the course of construction, UNFILLED has been an exercise in connections, collections and collaboration. From salvaged materials, to IKEA-inspired ‘glyphs’, the time and about-intensive installation embodies both artists tendencies towards wasteless and temporal art-making practices.
The centric circles of aromatic powder emanate from the exact centre of the gallery floor, each ring fashioned from traced, online, furniture catalogues. As Feeney and Raffan work with these symbols, icons of the glut of choice IKEA provides it’s consumers, their original intent is displaced. By the very nature of stencilling, the artists transform what was once infinite and vacuous by quite literally ‘filling the void’.
Exhibition text: Belinda Howden, UNFILLED, The John Paynter Gallery/The Lock Up, 2009.
Installation images 1-4: unfilled, 2009, dried tea leaves and stencilled floor work, approx. 300cm x 300cm.
Installation images: unfilled, The John Paynter Gallery, 2010. Images courtesy of Ruth Feeney 2010.