MAstars 2014: Elizabeth-Anne Curistan, MFA Fine Art

MAstars 2014: Elizabeth-Anne Curistan, MFA Fine Art Elizabeth-Anne Curistan, Neither, 2014. Found and offcuts of various types of wood, hinges, screws, burnt interior. 213cm x 243cm x 195cm & 124cm x 134cm x 243cm. Credit: Paul Marshall

Matt Packer selects Elizabeth-Anne Curistan from the University of Ulster for MAstars


You could smell Elizabeth-Anne Curistan’s 'Neither' (2014) from the corridor of the MFA University of Ulster degree show. It was a particular smell of burnt wood – a smell that might conjure up images of a bonfire or an arson attack. Fire seems to have that unique power of simultaneously representing playful adventure and evil destruction, the energies of life and entropy in equal measure.

Elizabeth-Anne Curistan Neither 2

Elizabeth-Anne Curistan, Neither, 2014. Found and offcuts of various types of wood, hinges, screws, burnt interior. 213cm x 243cm x 195cm & 124cm x 134cm x 243cm. Credit: Paul Marshall

In the exhibition space 'Neither' presented itself as two large floor-standing sculptural elements. These were slatted wooden structures that could have been pieces of a garden shed or a similar closeted architecture, cut into sheer angles so that they seemed to rise from the floor like the surviving ends of sinking ships. One of these structures was propped by charred wooden struts, the other self-supporting on its hinges. These structures seemed to have been burnt from their undersides, with a few stains and smoke trails creeping through to the outer surface. In this sense 'Neither' was a work that responded to the fundamentals of sculpture, a work built on the differences between the outfacing and in-facing conditions of a material object.

Elizabeth-Anne Curistan Neither 3

Elizabeth-Anne Curistan, Neither, 2014. Found and offcuts of various types of wood, hinges, screws, burnt interior. 213cm x 243cm x 195cm & 124cm x 134cm x 243cm. Credit: Paul Marshall

The use of found materials has been a mainstay of Curistan’s recent work. She regularly uses offcut materials found in skips or in charity shops, fragments that have been cast outside the circuits of utility or design. Adopted, appropriated, and ritually burnt in the course of her work, these materials retain a pulse of their former function. Intentionally or unintentionally, there were footprints in the residual soot on the floor of the exhibition space, the evidence of other onlookers and witnesses coming and going – another reminder of the various temporalities that accrue in and around a work of art.

Selected by Matt Packer
Published June, 2014

View Elizabeth-Anne Curistan's profile >


About Matt Packer

Matt Packer is a curator and writer living and working in Derry, Northern Ireland. He is currently Director at Centre for Contemporary Art Derry~Londonderry and Co-Curator of LIAF 2015 (Lofoten International Art Festival), in the Lofoten Islands, Norway. He has curated numerous exhibitions in institutional and independent contexts and published texts in Frieze, Kaleidoscope, Camera Austria, Concreta, and Source Photographic Review, among others. He is a graduate of the curatorial programme at Goldsmiths College, London and a member of IKT (The International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art.


Further information

elizabethannecuristan.com
cca-derry-londonderry.org
belfastschoolofart.com
mfabelfast.wordpress.com

 

 

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