Philippa Hagon
We know ourselves as part and as crowd
Dug-up ceramic plumbing, preloved discarded toys, reclaimed suitcase, reclaimed memories, wood, metal, cement, hessian, cardboard, synthetic wig, plastic jug, tape, coke bottle, water, juicy fruit chewing gum, wool, rope, occy straps, plastic zip ties, star picket, cement pavers, synthetic polymer paint.
Dimensions variable
5 pieces - approx - 180 x 200 x 130 cm
$2200
about
the
work
The work “We know ourselves as part and as crowd” plays with assemblage as poetics of relation. A sequence of objects forms a language of repetition, intuition, and improvisation to form an ocular open-ended riddle. Reclaimed objects are dug up, sourced, and used to confront our contemporary life and culture while referencing social and art-historical precedents.
The composition intersects both sculpture and painting with an emphasis on materiality and process traversing complexity and ridiculousness. All the elements make one large canvas. The colour removes the boundaries of the objects so there is no subject/object relationship; the parts are unified for the whole.
This work is built on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion that assemblage is relational and co-functioning. It is an ontological constitution where conative bodies merge then disassemble and reassemble with new or other elements and new associations are forged or mutated. The work is an assemblage of material objects, an assemblage of thought, and of embedded past and present individual and collective socio-cultural experiences.
The collision of things taps into thoughts and feelings within the viewer. The socio-cultural materials are used to enact an embodied memory to trigger an affected experience.
bio
Philippa Hagon is a Sydney-based artist working on Gadigal land. She works within expanded painting, sculpture, and installation practices. Her work spans various platforms and mediums and combines life experience, art history, and socio-cultural references using a diverse range of materials, media, and processes.
Hagon’s practice examines the use of common and reclaimed materials to think beyond their useful/literal function. The reclaimed materials invoke the socio-cultural excesses of late capitalism. The discarded waste poses questions of value/less and worth/less, not only in the discarded materials themselves but in the subjective relationships we have to the materiality of desire and excess.
Hagon completed a BFA (2007) and an MFA (2019) in painting from the National Art School. She is a 2023 Waverley Artist Studio recipient and was the 2020 and 2021 Coal Loader Centre for Sustainably artist in residence. Recent group exhibitions include Minerva_Sydney (“Gelato Café” Redfern, “Eddy” Central Station, and “Farr St” Marrickille), The Bondi Pavilion Gallery, Articulate Project Space and Airspace, Marrickville, and had a solo work in the Inside Outside Sculpture Plinth, Ted Mack Civic Park, North Sydney. Hagon was a finalist in the North Sydney Art Prize, 2022, and HIDDEN Sculpture Prize, Rookwood Cemetery, Western Sydney, 2022.
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