Soft Pawn takes its title from the chess game piece as a metaphor for human vulnerability and manipulation. Kath Mason (small scale sculpture) , Georgina Pollard (painting) and Alex Wisser (photography) brought together their friendships and art practices in an exhibition featuring tension, indiscriminate manipulation, game playing and grids that alluded to the manipulation of people being similar to the way a 'Pawn' piece is moved around a chess board and such resonances in life, love and sex.

Mason pushes and pulls soft fabric and aluminium in a melding that elicit strange relationships, a polarity of textures and unusual self-organising forms. Pollard utilises and manipulates the grid in her paintings investigating abstraction and notions, as a woman, in a 'post-feminist' era, whilst partner, Wisser, created an 'autopawnographical' photographic montage in the style of a protest poster.

Soft Pawn
By Kath Mason, Georgina Pollard and Alex Wisser

The Soft Pawn Collective began with the idea that we didn't want to begin with an idea. After all we were already friends, why did we need concepts to unite us? Our practices, variously, were already relatively more or less established; our prejudices and preoccupations already informed our practices, why did we need to pretend that what we did was somehow subservient to a set of ideas that we could only have hatched while attempting to apply for a grant?

It's true, we were at the pub, drinking. We were being childish. We were playing games. Soft Pawn emerged as a play on words, an arbitrary combination of terms signifying a fantastical, non existent paradigm. Irregardless. When we woke up the next morning we were stuck with it as the name for our show. The intervening time has been spent making art and attempting to stretch that name over it.

As a process it can be compared to the design of a human being in which you begin with the skeleton, and then because you tend to avoid difficult work, you decide what clothes he or she will be wearing. The rest of your time must be spent fleshing out a body that will fit on the skeleton, and at the same time fit within the clothes. Surprisingly, the result is a coherence not all that different in nature to those comprehensions we take for granted as being well founded in various authorities, and buttressed by convention and consensus. The only difference is that the mortality of our understanding is all too evident.

"The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary"
Ferdinand Saussure.

by Alex Wisser

Kath Mason

Soft Pawn is about manipulation and vulnerability. The materials I have used in this show can be seen to have been manipulated in a stressful way in some pieces and in others to try to convey fun or comfort.

My work as an artist begins by working and playing with the materials. Working almost in collaboration with the material, I push the material allowing it to push back and so develop into what it wants to be and what I want it to be.

For me, these pieces are a kind of journal in three dimensions. These pieces are the quick sketches before the major works I am beginning and aim to complete this year.

Manifold
Kathleen Mason
2008
aluminium, rivets, canvas, stuffing, thread
20cm x 20cm x 11cm

Performance Anxiety
Kathleen Mason
2008
aluminium, rivets, canvas, stuffing, thread
25cm x 20cm x 15cm

Built for Comfort
Kathleen Mason
2008
aluminium, rivets, canvas, stuffing, thread
24cm x 20cm x 14cm

Rhapsody
Kathleen Mason
2008
aluminium, rivets, canvas, stuffing, thread
24cm x 20cm x 14cm

Three's a Crowd
Kathleen Mason
2008
aluminium, rivets, canvas, stuffing, thread
15cm x 15cm x 7cm

Breakfast for Two - Sunny Side Up
Kathleen Mason
2008
aluminium, rivets, canvas, stuffing, thread
22cm x 16cm x 12cm

Looking for Love
Kathleen Mason
2008
aluminium, rivets, canvas, stuffing, thread
27cm x 15cm x 10cm

Puppy Love
Kathleen Mason
2008
aluminium, canvas, stuffing, thread
11cm x 8cm x 8cm

Footloose
Kathleen Mason
2008
aluminium, canvas, stuffing, thread
12cm x 5cm x 7cm

Fancy Free
Kathleen Mason
2008
aluminium, canvas, stuffing, thread
11cm x 8cm x 8cm

Broken Hearted
Kathleen Mason
2008
aluminium, canvas, stuffing, thread
30cm x 10cm x 10cm

Georgina Pollard

From the title of the exhibition "soft pawn", I have focused on two aspects of the chess board; the dynamic aesthetic of the grid and the processes of manipulation involved in game playing. Neither of these ideas differs from my continuing practice of investigating and challenging the abstracted idea of "culture" as something separate to "nature". For me, my obsession with repainting the grid is little different to the need of a spider to recreate her web night after night. The manipulation and chance of playing chess might be a means of re-enacting or approximating death. Having begun my career in theatre, I am continually fascinated and frustrated by the idea of painting as a two dimensional surface. But rather than taking Rauschenberg's lead and project painting into space, combining painting with sculpture (combines), I return to the abstract expressionists idea of 'alloverness' with its web-like associations. By using perspective and optical effects to create space I am implicating the viewer in the work, manipulating the eye. This process is an externalisation of the grid, but the exhibition also includes two self portraits which use the grid to map out an internal and psychological space.

Interplay #1
Georgina Pollard
2008
oil on canvas
45cm x 35cm

Interplay #2
Georgina Pollard
2008
oil on canvas
45cm x 35cm

Central
Georgina Pollard
2008
oil on canvas
140cm x 180cm approx

Looking Glass
Georgina Pollard
2007
oil on canvas
110cm x 83cm

Hygiene
Georgina Pollard
2008
oil on linen
137cm x 84cm

I’m beginning to feel the cold (near doorway)
Georgina Pollard
2008
acrylic on canvas
64cm x 76cm

Self-portrait; mapping the divided # 1 (face)
Georgina Pollard
2007
oil on canvas
120cm x 70cm approx

Self-portrait; mapping the divided # 2 (torso)
Georgina Pollard
2007
oil on canvas
70cm x 86cm approx

Alex Wisser

THIS IS NOT A GAME is an autopawnographical work that timidly hints at the catastrophic stake placed between the metaphor of the game and its inadmissible application to life, love, sex, and some other attractive terms. It is solely intended to make you to want to see more.

This is not a Game
Alex Wisser
2008
digital media
120cm X120cm

In The Flesh - an open studio exhibition

Meanwhile, At The Vanishing Point, gallery director and artist Brendan Penzer laid bare the artistic process for all as he set up studio in the gallery. The audience saw the artist accumulating materials, building ephemeral installations, conceptualising and realising ideas, drawing, listing, counting, sweating, living and breathing, all whilst undertaking action research on his project; Take It Home With You!*

In The Flesh - an open studio exhibition was an evolving and emerging documentation of the physical and creative processes of Take It Home With You! which saw Penzer collecting, on a daily basis, recyclable detritus from the Cooks River in and around the environment of Gough Whitlam Park, Undercliffe.

Armed with inflatable boat, net and extendable garbage 'grabber', Penzer set the daily goal of collecting at least one large garbage bag full of recyclable materials that had been discarded by others and found their way into the water and onto banks of the Cooks River and in the parkland of Gough Whitlam Park. From there the materials would be transformed into 'environmental sculpture'.

In The Flesh gave the audience the opportunity to not only engage in the art making process and see the evolution of artistic concepts and ideas, but also to engage in dialogue about the relationships between people and place on personal, societal and environmental platforms. Penzer was seeking to highlight and encourage more rigorous ecological responsibility of individuals in society whilst showcasing the environmental burden that, not only rubbish, but un-recycled recyclables is doing to our environments and ecologies, let alone the burden on landfill.

{Take It Home With You! was a month-long environmental sculpture/performance as part of the Baker's Dozen exhibition on the Cooks River. The results of which were exhibited at the Riverworks Environmental Sculpture Festival, Gough Whitlam Park, Sat29th and Sun30th March}

In The Flesh: An Open Studio Exhibition
By Brendan Penzer

In this installation, I have utilised the gallery space as studio space, allowing the viewer to gain an 'In The Flesh' experience of the process that I am undertaking to create this work for the Baker's Dozen exhibition at Riverworks 2008 (29 - 30 March 2008), which will be held at Gough Whitlam Park, Undercliff.

I have also used a variety of other oddities that were found on my daily treasure hunts to make new works, commenting on art, the way we experience art and what constitutes an artwork.

Starting on Clean Up Australia Day, I have collected 1 black garbage bag of recyclable materials, such as plastic and glass bottles, paper and plastic cups and cigarette packets during daily visits to the park, armed only with a 1 ½ person inflatable boat, life jacket, garbage bags and 'grabber'.

Essentially, this whole project is a month long performance piece, positioned at the blurring of edges of art and environmental activism, followed by a two day installation. The idea is to highlight the fact that tonnes of recyclable materials end up in our waterways and in landfill everyday because people, in general, are not taking responsibility for their own waste and hence not taking enough responsibility for their natural environments. These materials could have been reused and/or taken home by their original owners and placed into household recycling.

Totem (February 13 2008)
Brendan Penzer
2008
140 x 90 x 90cm
recycled materials, synthetic turf and text

Art = Fragile, Fragile = Art
Brendan Penzer
2008
dimensions variable
found objects, Cooks River, March 2008

Nourishing Terrains
Brendan Penzer
2008
dimensions variable
found objects, Cooks River, March 2008

Trophy
Brendan Penzer
2008
dimensions variable
found objects, Cooks River, March 2008

The Future Eaters Volume 2
Brendan Penzer
2008
artist book
dimensions variable

Images (left to right): In The Drink, A Burning Itch