Simon Wilde: Labyrinth

08-19 Feb ,

Painting & Drawing

Delicate poetry combines with heavy metal in the diverse Global Gallery exhibition

First published on 8 Feb 2012. Updated on 20 Feb 2012.

This event has finished

Simon Wilde, poet and painter, is somewhat of an accidental artist. “It’s quite fortuitous really. A few years ago I rode a bicycle out to Lake Eyre, and when I was out there in the middle of the desert, I wrote a poem and decided I wanted to present it somehow. When I got back to Sydney I was looking around at a scrap metal yard and came across a piece of rusty steel. It was the colour of it that brought everything together - it was like the desert. I used that as the base, used power tools and rust to create the letters of a poem, and then after that I just started to discover what would happen when you put ink directly onto the steel.”

At each step in Wilde's new exhibition you’ll find something different - starting with steel canvases covered with rust and ink, moving towards a selection of abstract photographs, and ending with a step into the underground subway of Osaka with a large mixed media installation.

Wilde’s unique process of putting paint to steel is a major feature of his artmaking. “It is all dependant on natural processes - it kind of runs away with you,” says Wilde. “I use a regular sheet of steel that you get from industrial suppliers and pre-treat it using a wire brush and an angle grinder. Then I leave it out in the rain for a bit to rust. As it changes I make adjustments and eventually end up with something that I am satisfied with - most of the time. But if it’s going really badly, I sometimes just let it go and put the whole piece out in the rain for six months and see what happens. I’ve left stuff up on my room for 10 months.”

The exhibition also features f 'Hong Kong Neon', an inspired photography-poetry installation. “It’s a structure made out of industrial plumbing materials,” he says. “They’re connected together with chains and whole lot of small prints of the Osaka subway system in Japan. I went around Osaka one day with a camera and a tripod, and just shot hundreds of photographs of the commuters and advertising.

“There are two very different strands to my work. One is based on poetry, and it’s obviously highly conceptual because that’s the nature of a poem, but with the abstract works it’s just really quite intuitive and simply based on the beauty of the patterns that emerge on the material.”

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Words by Emily Herdman