pamela kouwenhoven
small works


small works  -  medium - all malthoid on board.



 

      
Pamela Kouwenhoven literally
      sets her horizons high. Embarking on a large investigative project
      that uses found materials in assemblages that hark back to the
      1960s European Arte Provera movement, Kouwenhoven has been consistently
      allowing the materiality of surface to dominate in her latest
      works.

      
Early works from the late
      1990s used found materials- discarded fragments from country
      cemeteries, and other objects- in elaborate constructions, such
      as " Shrine to Memory"[2004].

      
From these emblematic installational
      works, seen in Adelaide in her 2000 exhibition at the New Land
      Gallery, "Memory Love and Loss", Kouwenhoven's work
      has evolved to a point where the work - now combining discarded
      metal and malthoid- is about the revelation of surfaces ravaged
      by time and the elements, and how these surfaces stand as a sign
      for the thing they represent - earth.

      
By placing the razor sharp
      edge of the horizon high, the artist has allowed the flat surface
      of her materials to have a double life, retaining the verticality
      of its unaltered material substance - encrusted, tarnished, pock-marked,
      like the withered skin of a dried out reptile - while at the
      same time functioning as a plain that receeds strongly away from
      the eye to the distant horizon.

      
The artist speaks of this
      process of transformation as one of metamorphosis; of how the
      malthoid, a bituminous substance used to weatherproof metallic
      surfaces such as roofing and rainwater tanks, through sustained,
      weathering contact with the elements, really begins to take on
      the characteristics of the land, in colour and surface texture.

      
Embedded within these images,
      simple, elegant, full of association, is a potent sense of the
      ahistoric, placeless quality that pervades the Australian situation.
      It is not surprising then, that works from this series are predominantly
      untitled. Revelling in the sheer complexity and subtlety found
      in a material subjected to the almost tectonic pressure of the
      weight of water, Kouwenhoven elicits a kind of wisdom from the
      earth.

      
Ken Orchard, Catalogue
      essay, "The Insistent Horizon" Adelaide Fringe 200