Sue Saxon and Jane Becker: All that is solid melts into air

The TWMA exhibition All that is solid melts into air is a site-specific project created by two Sydney-based artists, Sue Saxon and Jane Becker, for Tarrawarra Museum of Art’s darkened North Gallery.

The artists see the medium of eggshells as appropriate for visually evoking their perception of a growing sensibility of fragility and defencelessness in the midst of the overwhelming dynamisms that are currently reshaping our world. Cracked, fragmented, hollowed out or illuminated from within, the symbolic and formal properties of the eggshells are applied to intriguing effect in a series of small sculptures, a mosaic on paper, cursive script and a large scale installation.

Sue Saxon has participated in 27 selected group exhibitions since 1990 including arist’s residencies in Budapest, New York and Paris. Her work seeks to chart the emotional and physical geographies of memory, drawing on popular culture, philosophical texts and the elemental, symbolic and sensuous qualities of the materials she uses, and she is represented in private and public collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art. The National Maritime Museum and The Jewish Museum of Australia.

Jane Becker has been an exhibiting artist since graduating from COFA in the mid 1980s, moving, over recent years, into the creation of large scale public art. In 2005 she won the Art Gallery Society of NSW Award for Sculpture by the Sea and through her work seeks to explore ways in which to shift the viewer’s perception.

The exhibition curator, Anthony Fitzpatrick, says: “These delicate and ephemeral works compel us to reconsider our relationship to nature and contemplate how our ongoing exploitation and degradation of the environment also diminishes humanity, further undermining and eroding our sense of connection to the natural world.”