Artist Statement 2020
Working within abstraction across painting and sculpture, Melinda Clyne’s practice seeks to give physical form to psychological and situational states inherent in the human experience.
By manipulating cast acrylic, which has been activated by high heat, this material’s pliability lends itself to permanently being embedded with a ‘form’, created solely through sustained and highly controlled hand pressure. By cooling in a matter of seconds, a distinct performative temporality is inherent. Agostino Bonalumi ( 1935-2013), one of the first to capitalise on surface plasticity, called his disrupted and protruding canvases – ”Estroflessione”, meaning they extended into space. These twisting disruptions to the acrylic canvas may activate the viewer, at a deeper psychological level.
Clyne has relentlessly investigated the meaning of the artist’s hand-applied mark , the ‘gesture’, to its reductive conclusions, and concurrently has turned her work focus to what is demanding her attention- the urgency of the climate change emergency.
Last summer’s savage bushfires were a wake -up call for everyone, and the consequences to vegetation and animals have propelled Clyne to address these issues through sculpture, using both found wood and her chosen material: cast acrylic. As a regenerative rural land owner, she hopes to draw attention to our precious resource of bushland, specifically trees, which are deemed essential to humankind’s future survival.
Instagram: @melindaclyne
Website: www.melindaclyne.com
