Evie Core

‘I don’t want something that will last forever’ – when Evie Core says this about their art, the medium is the message. 

The lifecycle of Core’s raw clay sculptures narrates a trajectory of perfect impermanence. Take the works from their recent solo show, RECLAIM: they no longer exist. 

Core works with donated clay – scraps from the back of artist studios, remnants of works built years prior, bags of disjecta. This is where the story of the works begin, already existing in a state of reuse and sustainability. 

When Core works with and processes clay, preparing it for structure, they do so with their hands, their skin, raw from the beginning: she sweats and moves into a meditative, sensory state. 

An inherent perfectionism in Core’s aesthetic drives them to create works that aim for anti-perfectionism. The works strive for ontological incompleteness and uncertainty, but they are not unfinished: these are the results of a dedicated, focused vision. They are anti-perfect by design, intentionally raw, left unfired, at risk of disintegration if embraced by nature’s tongue. 

This is how some of the works from RECLAIM found their resolution: driven in the back of a car, softly cushioned, to the beach, where they were introduced to the water. These beautiful, intimate objects of documentary and autoethnography were then filled with ocean waves as they crumbled and dissolved. Half of the clay was lost in the wake, and half returned in a sandy mix to buckets that Core then drove home. 

To know Core’s art is to see a line that threads from a childhood in rural New South Wales, fashioning mud pies and dirt potions on the grounds of the family farm, through to technical mastery wrought at the National Art School in Sydney. As Core’s work has grown and engaged with an increasing range of philosophical intentions, it continues to strive towards a singular revelation: this is clay. 

The work is about clay and strives to be true to clay. It is not a glossy commercial product placed on a pedestal beneath boutique lighting and ready to be gift-wrapped and couriered in the mail: this is clay. These are works of subtle, faint sculptural grace that cradle in your hand, and they are enormous, bigger-than-human tomes resonating an ancient noise beneath silence and intimacy. 

This is clay as universal – it is not necessary to recognise that Core’s clay rises to render an expression of some fundamental statement about the accessibility of human truth, of its deliverance through the gestures of the body, of creating something out of an already existing world and forming it into new life: all you need to know is that this is clay, and it will, beyond art and body, live forever, for a while.

Leith Hamilton

Basquiat on the Beach.

Nature is unknowable beyond human language, yet by art we can make it rhyme. In Hamilton's 'Slow Decay' we face the mirror of nature as a series of echoes in counterpoint: that which will, and will not, succumb to entropy.

The opening triptych, Mitosis I II III, confronts this gap by way of some of Hamilton's most immediate reference points - the totemic symbolism of Basquiat, the spatial apparatus of Bacon, the maximalism of de Kooning - to delineate time's arrow.

Long, rubbery legs balmed in youth and moulded by the ocean will never die; atomic eyes streaming comet tails are already blinded by too much light from the end zone; surf breaks are fleeting cathedrals that promise eternal ratios but must always yield.

Sunflowers I II III sit in a private room out the back, a second triptych, saffron flourishes rising to bloom in tumbles of beautiful women, languid in their postures and threaded amongst sawtooth petalled geometries, fading skyward where flowers live forever.

Thalassophile I and II sit alongside the windows of the gallery, fitting for pieces that appear painted as transparency and set against the sea and the horizon. Nature is perfect because it is beyond human - what would an imperfect wave look like?

In 'Slow Decay', we confront this position: when wrapped in water, what of us is nature? The part that breaks, the disintegration of youth and how we float, the numerology of fuzz pedal bacteria - the ocean knows not our narratives, only the gravity of the gaps we fill.