Paula Dunlop
Attachment 2024 Glass beads, grout, fibreglass mesh, adhesive; extant algae and lichens on brickwork image credit: Louis Lim
Diamond Screen 2023 Glass beads, nylon monofilament, steel mesh, timber, video monitors, sonar sensor Screens of all kinds are ubiquitous in our lives as boundary markers, filters, buffers, and mediators. Diamond Screen reimagines the components of a window: the four glass panels comprise thousands of diamond-shaped beads, hand woven into patterns that mimic the apetures of security doors and window grilles. The tactile surface of the panels, which visitors were invited to touch gently, is reminiscent of pressed door and window glass. Video vignettes play out on monitors behind, activated by the viewer's presence -- the light blurring and bending into movements of colour and shadow.
Open Studio 2023 For Open Studio, Paula Dunlop has drawn from the vernacular architecture of her home studio -- a 1980's walk-up unit block -- to create a temporary public lounge. This space was the original Queensland Art Gallery Visitor Lounge and, significantly for Dunlop's practice, often houses displays of the Collection's decorative and applied art, labels sometimes used to describe functional objects such as glassware, ceramics, jewellery and furniture. Here, Dunlop's lounge exists as a convenient crossover between gallery and home: a mutable space that is at once both semi-public and semi-private, for both social interaction and solitude, and accomodates activity as well as idleness, where boundaries and intersections of all kinds are created and re-created. The artist invites us to consider not only the material and cultural histories of the spaces we inhabit and the interactions we have with them, but also our daily negotiation and renegotiation of the ideal 'home', our sense of self in both relation and reaction to it, and the ways we make and embody ideas of personal and material security. Open Studio: Paula Dunlop comprises two spaces: The Artist Gallery and the Lounge. The spaces are connected both conceptually and experientially through research Dunlop has conducted as artist in residence.
Braid
2022
Stainless steel ball chain
23cm x 23cm x 88cm