Thickets & Clearings
Chora Carleton
17-27 November 2022
Every day you navigate an unspooling flow of moments. In time, space and perception. How they are shaped frames your experience of life. Sometimes life is thick with extraneous, momentous or emotionally heavy things. Sometimes, in the emptiness and clearness of quiet, the day unfolds infinitely. These are the thickets and clearings of life.
In an explorative in situ installation, Chora Carleton presents Thickets and Clearings. Created in the gallery, the mural like drawing expands day by day. The work responds to what happens within the gallery as well as what is observed through the panoramic windows. Carleton’s approach resonates with the experience of the everyday. She gathers sensory misfunctions and fixations on colours, creating fragmented abstractions that are translated into swathes of colour punctuated by sharp lines.
In the haziness of the pastels, a miasma of colour emerges.
In a fated serendipity, this project harks to Simon Morris’ Room of Time and the retrospective works of Johanna Margaret Paul in Imagined in the Context of a Room, both currently showing at the City Gallery. Both Morris and Paul are precedent cornerstones in Carleton’s developing practice. The contextual vibrancy of this unintentional correlation stems from Carleton’s contemporary research on new perspectives on perception and radical affection. In this exhibition, slow perception, material natures, domestic acuity and definitions of identity are highlighted.
Carleton reflects on how the world is awash with a capitalistic tidal wave of information. And in a quiet reframing of priority, Carleton proposes to go against the culture of working to fulfil normative aspirations and focus instead on; finding place and making time. They are activities that recognise a recent radical reframing of life in the recovery and realignments of relationships to land, community, and self. The concepts behind Thickets and Clearings arose from the essay Thickets by Raqs Media Collective in the book Slow Spatial Reader: Chronicles of Radical Affection.
A thicket is a concentration of living matter. In forests, gardens and fields, thickets arise where different plant species find it possible to thrive together in a wild celebration of life. Conversations too can have thickets, points of intersection of lines of force. So can concentrations of culture and instances of artistic action (p.264).
This essay and more will be available to read in the gallery.
