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Indepth Arts News:
"TEAMWORK: Recent work by Donna Marcus"
2001-04-06 until 2001-05-06
Gold Coast City Art Gallery
Gold Coast, QL,
AU Australia
Gold Coast City Art Gallery is delighted to host a solo exhibition of the work of sculptor Donna Marcus. As a local artist who has exhibited widely in regional Queensland and interstate, with work in several major state and national collections, Marcus is one of Queensland's most widely recognised artists and is a finalist in the prestigious 2001 Helen Lempriere Sculpture Award.
Marcus' work often features items immediately recognizable to most, such as anodised teapots, egg poachers, aluminium saucepans and colanders from the 1950s, as well as plastic microwave containers and jelly moulds that she fashions into extraordinary anthropomorphic shapes.
Her witty sculptures speak about the commonality of human experience and offer a comment on the nature of contemporary sculpture, turning the everyday, mundane ephemera of life into the truly uncanny.
Donna Marcus' work appeals on several levels, for its use of universally familiar objects arranged as sculptural 'installations' that often invite a phenomenological experience of the work.
Teamwork surveys the last five years of Marcus' practice, with a focus on several key themes: the City series, the Creatures series, and the Dome series, which includes the artist’s homage to plastic, Glowing Defiance 1999, a huge, illuminated geodesic dome fashioned from plastic microwave containers, produced by Defiance Flour.
Marcus finds the elements of her intricate whimsical sculptures at Lifeline and Salvation Army depots and recycling bins, at school fetes, car boot sales, and bric-a-brac fairs. As the old adage would have it, someone else's trash is always someone else’s treasure. Indeed for Marcus, these musty dens of old clothes and the leftovers from deceased estate kitchens offer a veritable feast of resource material. Her unique works are in part highly nostalgic for a bygone era, the Jetsons meets minimalism, whilst engaging with current dialogues about contemporary sculpture.
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