Q&A with Rosslynd Piggott
In regard to Natured Studies at Void_Melbourne 2024
1. Tell me about where you work, your city, neighbourhood and studio space.
I work in a studio in Fitzroy, an inner suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. The neighbourhood is perceived as cool, busy, vibrant with much cafe, retail and bar life. The buildings still mostly date to the Victorian era- both commercial and residential- gentrification continues. I am fortunate to occupy/ rent the top level of a Victorian building- living and working flows across spaces, with a large studio door to block out daily distractions. My studio holds works in progress, mostly paintings, a desk, usually a pile of books, a table of collection objects, many in glass, some objects have been collected from flea markets, each with a story, an indoor garden of orchids, a sitting area and a mirrored table assembled from offcast samples from a previous installation work. The space is an ordered accumulation flooded with light. It is a bubble space, a constructed sanctuary from daily life directly outside.
2. Does the geographic location influence your work?
Yes and no. Yes, because I am fortunate to live in the eye of the storm. Historical inner city Melbourne and back streets Fitzroy are relatively calm compared to sprawling ring roads and newer suburbs. I live close to a historic outdoor pool; swimming is definitely a strong and regular aspect of my studio practice. Many established and well planted gardens bring nature and seasons into the surrounding streets. During lockdown, the sensations of the local gardens became a vivid subject matter of great solace. No, because my inner world is an accumulation of life and travel experiences, memories, dreamings- this creates a bubble space, wherever I am.
3. This work is a technical glass object of high refinement. Where does this fit within the larger practice, as you invoke many characteristics of glass across your work?
My first object in glass, 100 Glasses 1991-92, was a physical and spatial response to an early painting Room with walls of glasses of water 1986, I painted an imagined room where the walls were made of glasses of water. It was a dream object, a fleeting image arising from a kind of reverie. Ideas often came as “flashes” and then would require months of work to make visible. I had wanted to make that object, but couldn’t afford to, glass is an expensive medium. 100 glasses was a way forward- a long line of hand blown glasses engraved with words, names of cities, nouns, verbs, a date in the past and in the future, latin names for flowers and 14 blank glasses- functioned as a transparent, light-capturing hovering flow of a suspended reverie. From this moment, I found glass to be an extraordinary carrier of time and space. A medium suspended in-flux between liquid and solid. From this time, I have worked with glass intermittently when it seemed to suit various ideas, notably air collections made in Europe and Japan. Also using historical Venetian glass as a part of Double breath( contained) of the Sitter 1993, restaged in 1998 and 2018-19. More recently, I have been working in Venice since 2012 with a master engraver to produce an ongoing series of sculptural works incorporating layers of wheel- engraved glass based on my drawings. A device for measuring Nothing 1999 and A device for measuring Doubt 1999 were part of exhibitions Nature in Black- paintings recording Night and Nature in Black- objects recording Night, shown at Bellas Gallery, Brisbane and Sutton Gallery, Mebourne, in 1999 and 2000 respectively and then objects were shown in Walter Van Beirendonck’s Window Gallery in Antwerp and then at Gallery 360 Degrees in Tokyo in 2001. These exhibitions came out of a period of loss and grief- there was a lot of darkness for my subject. However, the devices are also strange imagined objects for attempting to measure what we don’t know, referencing an act of vague impossibility. In Buddhist terms, the Nothing is Everything is Nothing. I’m thinking about big space and nano space, no time, still time, but also the space of our bodies and emotional space. The two devices were made in collaboration with a scientific glass blower, the late Rainer Arnold, a highly skilled German immigrant, who operated an export business from his home workshop. The beautiful boxes were made by Norbert Herold, a German bookbinder, who has since returned to Berlin.
4. Are there artists that go to as muses/influences?
A vast web, too many to mention, of influences, experiences, makers, muses, buildings, objects, places, sensations have all informed my works. They are all moments of falling in love, that is both ongoing and circular. Once something/ place/ one affects you, it never affects you- there will always be a trace of affect in your sensory membrane. Vibes as follows and more- Piero della Francesca, Giovanni Bellini, Cimabue, Bronzino, Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, Alessio Baldovinetti’s Portrait of a Lady in Yellow, Fra Angelico’s angel wings, the scent of Narciso at Farmaceutica Santa Maria Novella, Florence in 1988, swimming in wild rock pools at Blairgowrie back beach as a child in early 1970s, Delphi 1976, Ubud 1974, butterfly wings, reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, The Pantheon during the Pentecost ceremony when rose petals pour through the oculus, Sanjusangendo Temple, Kyoto, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Enoura Observatory, Kamakura period, Jizō Botatsu at the National Gallery of Victoria, reading Yukio Mishima in Japan, Ngayartu Kujarra made by 12 women across 3 generations from Martunil, Western Australia at the National Gallery of Victoria, James Turrell, Yoshihiro Suda, Agnes Martin,Marcel Duchamp’s Air de Paris, fabricshandwoven, handcolored, Japanese, Indian, Italian, French, English- handled and seen in close proximity have always had a profound affect- remembering the original fabric covered walls of the Palais du Fontainebleau. Minjerribah/ North Stradbroke Island, Queensland, Venice, Paris, Japan, Giardini di Ninfa, south of Rome and many more places hold a continuing connection. Above all- the sky, the sea, flowers- cherry blossom, peonies, magnolias, scented roses, Lily of the Valley, orchids, wisteria, violets, gardenia- light, light causation, prisms, auras. into one style.
5. Can you give us an insight into your process? Is it a slow or fast process?
Slow processes, fast and slow thinking and paused time. A time that is an extended space.
6. You work across many disciplines. What is dominant in the image generation process, or does it shift?
Thought and sensations, poised between lived sensation and then an image, form or idea is triggered, which may or may not become a work. Of course, this has shifted over a long practice, just as I have as a person. I have always used notebooks, more prolifically when I was younger, increasingly, I seem to want to hold thoughts/ sensations/ the intuited in my body, in silence. What will bloom will bloom. Yes, the studio is a silent space.
7. Collection, measurement and seriality are often elements in your work. Would you say that this “increment” motif is diaristic for you?
The increment motif has always been about a futile, fragile human attempt to measure the immeasurable. It is not diaristic in the personal sense. I have been fond of a repetition motif, as a kind of way of extending time, a blurring of time to reach another space, perhaps like a chanting, a song, something hypnotic and dreamy.
8. What worries you?
Lack of love, sharing and true compassion for other humans, non-humans and our miraculous planet.
9. This piece has a museological feel, as if it been pulled from a medical museum? Do any such spaces some to mind for you?
In 1988, I was shown into a hidden room at the Farmaceutica Santa Maria Novella, in Via della Scala, Florence. Only Florentines of a certain social status knew of the Farmaceutica SMN then, it’s origins as a medieval herbalist attached to the Basilica Santa Maria Novella. It was very local knowledge at the time. Mirrored doors of the main salon were opened to reveal a room of Renaissance glass alchemical vessels. It was an intensely wondrous moment- literally like falling through a molten mirror.
10. This work has many states of legibility allowing the work to speak with other types of work as per this exhibition. Do you feel your work has the ability to expand into differing contexts and dialogues?
Yes, as the work/s draw from an expansive arc, they also speak to differing contexts and conversations. Oh dear, this question has just made me realize that I am the person at a dinner party who seems to hear more than one conversation and shifts between them. It can be complex.
