Andrea Eckersley, Partial coherence, 2017, site-specific painting and light installation, dimensions variable
Exhibition Opening: Friday 24 March 6pm-8pm
Exhibition to be introduced by Dr Terri Bird (Monash University)
Andrea Eckersley in Conversation with Meredith Turnbull
Andrea Eckersley works with an expanded understanding of painting, where the surface of the artwork becomes more than the application of pigment to canvas and instead manifests itself as a site of material investigation. Through recasting relationships with painting practice, Partial coherence presents a space within which the canvas, the wall, lighting and the body are implicated in the realisation and experience of an artwork. Alongside painterly works, Eckersley utilises light installations, bronze sculptures, constructed shelving and garment making, in order to position surfaces, affect and material as uniquely interrelated concepts.
Eckersley is a lecturer in Fashion Design, at RMIT University and received a PhD in Fine Arts (Painting) from Monash University in 2016. Primarily interested in the way the body interacts with abstract shapes, Andrea’s work investigates the material aspects of painting with a particular focus on surfaces. She has recently contributed a chapter for the upcoming book Practising with Deleuze: design, dance, art, writing, philosophy (forthcoming Edinburgh University Press). Eckersley is the art editor at the Deleuze Studies Journal and contributes to national and international conferences.
Previous solo exhibitions include Shed by the sun in eclipse in 2016 at Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne, in which the artist explored painterly surfaces as events, felt as differences in intensity. Eckersley’s exhibition Surface Activations, 2015, Monash University School of Art, Design and Architecture Graduate Gallery, Melbourne, considered relationships between painting and the surface, through materials including light and sculpture, as well as painting. The exhibition was the culmination of the artist’s PhD research project. In 2014, Eckersley was curated into Depthless Flatness by artists Bryan Spier and Steven Rendall, as part of ‘Incidents Above a Bar’, a series of exhibitions interrogating contemporary painting theory and practice.
Eckersley has exhibited at Platform Public Contemporary Art Spaces, Nellie Castan Gallery, Craft Victoria, c3 and West Space in Melbourne. In 2016 she was the inaugural winner of the Royal Como Art Prize in 2016. Eckersley is represented in various Australian private collections, as well as the Justin Art Foundation.
