Sylvia Maher is an artist whose primary concerns are material cultures and the environment. PASSAGE incorporates iron and carbon pigments in a series of large works commenting on the anthropocene.
The pigments created from industrial and agricultural byproducts have all been transformed by hand in a slow, laborious process before being used to rapidly paint a stream of consciousness based on her journeys through the urban landscape.
The artist embodies an anachronistic being observing the city and comparing it to a new frontier. Her art practice projects onto a future world beyond human time, where the remnants of the urban world have become deposits in the strata of the rock, while referencing a history of human mark making and visual languages.
Critiquing consumerism and the longevity of materials, her work explores the sense of timelessness that embodies carbon and iron and their pivotal role in past, present and future civilisations.
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PASSAGE, installation view (detail)
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PASSAGE: Rise over the primordial, iron and carbon pigment on cotton, 230 × 150cm
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Installation view (detail)
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PASSAGE: Residue and Ephemeral 1, installation view
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Detail
Research
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The creation of charcoal to be ground into the carbon powder
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Charcoal and impurities
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Inside the creation of the iron pigment
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Unground ochre pigment made from Iron