Abstract Machines: Fusion Box Sculptures, collages, deconstructions, re-assemblages – modernism reconsidered. In part an homage to the great Surrealist Box Makers and artists of the 20th Century, to Joseph Cornell and Leonora Carrington, modernist writers Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, the works combine wood, metal, glass, canvas as objects of altered meaning and value. Working with metallica, found objects, deconstructed machines like typewriters, sound players, slide projectors, cameras, and inspired by Gertrude Stein’s 1925 essay ‘Composition As Explanation’, this is Composition As Recombination.

The Archaeology of Things focuses on everyday objects with inner complexities that remain hidden, whose only function is in combination with other things, with the idea of a machine, transformation of energy and meaning. Modernist things like modernism itself, always an unstable form, is now moving on past an industrial base to new materials and combinations. Metal itself carries the memories of a passing age. This is not nostalgia but a kind of archaeology of shifted contexts. Patterns in our brains create new orders out of the chaos, indecipherable texts and languages – an abstraction of things in a new time frame. 

Abstract Machines was exhibited at the Shop Gallery, Glebe NSW, from10 to 22 May 2019 http://theshopgalleryglebe.blogspot.com/2019/04/suzanne-bellamy-10-22-may-2019-opening.html

 – Suzanne Bellamy