13 – 21 October @ Spectrum Project Space ◆

Edith Cowan University’s (ECU) Spectrum Project Space proudly presents Within Touching Distance, new paintings by Mardi Crocker. The works have been created as part of Crocker’s current PhD research at Curtin University. Crocker’s research explores the everyday object, focusing on the intimate space of the bathroom, the materiality of the objects that inhabit this space and our sensorial experience of them.

“These things inhabit our bodily orbit, “a half-lit place of blurs and glimpses”, where everything is within reach, arranged to be touched and felt for without looking. They are also unremarkable, ubiquitous, and easily and often replaced, and so, are twice overlooked. Despite this they persist, or something of them persists. Traces and remnants, affects; impressions of shape and shadow, of surface and texture, sensory memories are generated and recalled when our bodies meet theirs, or look past them”.1

By focusing on the ways in which we know these objects through habituated, often automatic handling of them, Crocker explains that the aim of the works is to pair a sensation of familiarity with a newly attentive attitude. These works engage with the traditions of still life painting, investigating contemporary materiality and our engagement with and attitude towards it.

Crocker says, “This body of work, and project as a whole, has had an interesting sort of side effect on me, in that now I often find myself dawdling in the personal hygiene aisle of Coles or taking longer than usual in the bathrooms of my friends and family. A few of my friends and family have been kind enough to let me pry in their bathrooms, crouching in their bathtubs and arranging and re-arranging bottles, tubs and tubes and ogling their countertops and moulded sinks to take photos to work from later.”

Event details

Within Touching Distance will be open to the public from Friday, 13 October to Friday, 20 October at Spectrum Project Space, Mount Lawley Campus, Edith Cowan University.

Opening event

Within Touching Distance will be officially opened by Dr Nicole Slatter, Director of Teaching and Learning for the school of Design and Art (SODA) at Curtin University.
Date: Thursday, 12 October 2017
Time: 6pm – 8pm
Venue: Spectrum Project Space, ECU Mount Lawley Campus, Building 3, Room 3.191

Open hours
Tuesday to Friday 10.00am – 5.00pm
Saturdays 12.00pm – 5pm

More info: www.facebook.com/spectrum.ecu/
Email: spectrum@ecu.edu.au