'Patchwork' began as a response to Melbourne’s lockdowns, prompting the artists to become more playful. The result is a collision of two opposing abstract painting practices creating an immersive space.
12 July to 14 August 2022
Opening night: Tuesday 12 July, 5.30-7.30pm. Free, but RSVP essential via Eventbrite.
Find out more about First Site Gallery at Open Day on Sunday 14 August.
Patchwork is a collaborative installation project between RMIT Honours students Aaron Ashwood and Yolanda Scholz Vinall. This project began during Melbourne’s 2021 lockdown, where both artists felt burnt out and unable to produce work within their own practices – the resulting work was a product of tackling these issues—to become more playful, to let loose and to share the load.
The installation is an accumulative series of mixed media paintings on canvas and other repurposed materials. Each artist contributed individual paintings and have installed them collaboratively in response to the First Site Gallery space. The installation is ‘patchwork’ like in form, with paintings being sewn together and/or collaged on site. There is a tension which lies within the artists’ juxtaposing languages of abstraction. One practice, being bold in both colour and form, and the other, containing a lightness through the pooling of colour and texture.
Artist bio
About Aaron Ashwood
Aaron Ashwood is a nipaluna Tasmanian emerging artist currently based in Naarm Melbourne, where he is undertaking his Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) degree at RMIT University. Aaron’s practice is multidisciplinary, playing out in the interactions and slippages between painting, sculpture, print, sound, video, photography, and installation. He is interested in the potential of materials collected from his immediate environment, and the way documenting transitions from one mode of making to another can produce new and unexpected forms. The produced works act as a document of the experience of thinking through making, a study of temporality through a language of abstraction and assemblage. Time, space, and memory combine into an aesthetics of resourcefulness, immediacy, and process.
About Yolanda Scholz Vinall
Based in Naarm Melbourne, Yolanda Scholz Vinall is an expanded abstract painter from Kaurna Adelaide. She is currently completing her Honours of Fine art at RMIT. Her paintings explore and materialise introspective and physical sensations that exist within relationships to local environments. These inquiries also take form in photography, installation and video works. Interested in material agency and sustainability, Scholz Vinall creates her own pigments through locally and ethically obtained materials, providing an embodied and visceral relationship to the time and place in which they have been made. Engaged with ideas around the sensory and ephemeral nature of memory and site, her works offer a hopeful calling to slow down; to build a more nurturing and sustainable relationship with our local, natural environments.
