Rebecca lives and works on Wurundjeri / Woi-Wurrung Country, Melbourne, Australia and
acknowledges the traditional owners and custodians. She would like to pay her respects to elders; past, present and future and acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded.
acknowledges the traditional owners and custodians. She would like to pay her respects to elders; past, present and future and acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded.
PRACTICE
I have recently undertaken and been awarded a Doctorate of Fine Art from RMIT University in the School of Art. In 2015 I completed Master of Contemporary Art with first class Honours at the Victorian College of the Arts. Recent exhibitions include Shut Up Mountain at the Bundoora Homestead for the 2019 Darebin Art Prize and at c3 Contemporary Art Space, Knot Not at Bus Projects and Alpha Beta Whatever at Notfair in Melbourne. Currently I teach in Visual Arts in the School of Creative Industries and the School of Art, RMIT University, Melbourne.
My practice is concerned with the creation of provisional, object-based installation, assemblage, collage and photography. I am interested in ideas regarding art practice as a vehicle for generating indirect knowledge.[i] My current research looks at ways that the unseen - termed as the unspoken, the invisible, the poetic and the psychological, and defined as something felt and known but evading direct visual representation and perception - can be articulated investigated in place and landscape and restructured in the material for the viewer to experience.
I am interested in investigating how the activation of semiotic slippage and disruptions to traditional categories of meaning can be used as methods to evoke the unseen in the material outcomes of the work. I aim to facilitate slips and subtle ruptures to the inherent and attributed semiotic function and meaning of things through strategies of collage, assemblage spatial arrangement, dialogue and material transformation, applied to sourced and re-purposed materials and objects.
Re-arrangement is an essential strategy, components, forms and motifs from prior works embedded with the history of their previous incarnations, are reworked into new assemblages. In this sense I view the work as a temporal collage of different forms, material histories, meaning and ideas, inhabiting a state of flux and resisting a definitive point of articulation. My PHD research project looks at strategies of collage and assemblage, within the context of photography and object based sculpture, as potential methods that can illuminate unseen meaning and new narratives and knowledge from the context of specific and metaphorical sites and landscape.
Rebecca Delange
[1] As articulated by Canadian composer, artist and writer Danielle Boutet in “Metaphors of the Mind: Art Forms as Modes of Thinking and Ways of Being,” in Carnal Knowledge, edited by Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, 29 – 39. London: I.B.Tauris, 2013