Dasein opens soon at OCH – Don’t miss it!

Local Walyalup/Fremantle artist Mandy Hawkhead has just announced her forthcoming art exhibition, Dasein.

Mandy explains that this body of work explores the human relationship with time – a concept dear to the heart of the Shipping News’ Editor and many others besides – challenging the audience to engage with a felt or lived experience of this ephemeral quantity.

Dasein opens 6pm, Friday 15 March at the fabulous Atrium Gallery, Old Customs House, 8 Phillimore Street, Fremantle.

The artist observes that time by the clock or UTC – Universal Coordinated Time – ‘provides an armature for the pressures and pace of life in the contemporary first world’. Using water as her primary material, Hawkhead hints at an alternative that explores how one might be present and move with time rather than against it.

The exhibition will invite the viewer to engage their senses and reflect on the concept of flow, gesturing towards the idea that these principles may be extended to life outside the white cube, encouraging reconciliation with temporality.

Hawkhead’s artworks particularly draw on the powerful positive effect water and watery sites can have on the mind and body, a claim supported by environmental psychology theories, and familiar to all those who gaze out to the ocean, delight in the patter of rain and relish the sensation of diving into a pool.

The desire to recontextualise and share the experience with her audience inside the gallery
space introduced many challenges. Overcoming these obstacles, Hawkhead uses many varied and sometimes unconventional ‘secondary’ materials to support and present the liquid, including irrigation parts, light, clay, wool, rubber and water pumps.

Mandy Hawkhead describes her aesthetic as ‘minimalist’, working with elemental materials such as water, sand and light, appreciating their capacity to move, hence marking time with change and movement.

As to the relationship of the concept of Dasein to the artist’s body of work, you might like to engage the artist at the Opening of the exhibition or a guy who may or may not be at the Opening – Martin Heidegger!

With a background in arts education and arts management, Hawkhead returned to her arts practice to make sense of the world. Presently concluding her Master of Research (Fine Art) at Curtin University, Mandy is an active contributor to the industry, coordinating community arts projects and as a director on the Artists’ Foundation of Western Australia board.

OPENING NIGHT: Friday 15 March at 6pm at Old Customs House, 8 Phillimore Street, Fremantle

EXHIBITION RUNS: Saturday 16 – Sunday 24 March, 11am – 4pm Wednesday- Sunday (closed Monday and Tuesday)

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