Echoing Paths Revised
A Solo Exhibition by Yolanda Scholz Vinall
Gallery 2
November 12 – December 3
Opening Reception: Saturday 14 November, 2 – 4pm
Yolanda Scholz Vinall is a multidisciplinary artist based in Naarm/Melbourne. At the heart of her practice lies an investigation into often-overlooked experiences, such as unpaid domestic labour, slow processes of making and our intimate relationships with our local environments. By focusing on decay, site, and process, Yolanda’s work encourages quiet contemplation. Moreover, it invites viewers to reconnect with their environment in a nurturing and
mindful way.
These ideas are explored intuitively through Scholz Vinall’s material-led studio practice, wherein she engages with a large variety of textiles such as silks, bedsheets, calico, linen, canvas and yarn. She paints, folds, dyes, rips, prints, drapes and pins the fabrics in various ways. Exploring how materials react and how sensations and imagery of her lived experience may become imbedded within the fabrics. Her textile based practice, in its essence, sits in a space where both materiality and internal experience converge. She explores this convergence further through her hand-built ceramic practice, wherein the inherent capabilities of clay and glass sit together with the evidence of her fingers building and forming the object. She does not pursue seamless excellence with her ceramics, instead, she pinches and pushes the coiled clay so that the human process of making becomes vitrified within the objects themselves.
Within her art practice, Scholz Vinall tries to contend with the un-ease of living in a profit and productivity driven society during a global environmental and humanitarian crisis. She posits that art, and a prioritised importance of the everyday lived experience, can offer a reprieve from the sludge of our technological driven desensitisation and the relentless catastrophic decisions that are being made by leaders and corporations around the world. She explores this discomfort through her focus on the everyday, ephemeral and internal experiences within community and ones local
environment, as well as the intrinsic value, history and processes of materials.
Echoing paths (revised) explores the idea of an art practice being forever in a state of flux, and how materials, ideas and methods can evolve over time. Scholz Vinall plays with how past markings can intersect with new ones, and how interesting outcomes can arise when old ideas are revisited.
Old works, drop sheets and materials are cut, ripped up, re-hung, re-stretched, repainted, layered, and reclaimed to form a new body of work. Here old paths, old colour use, old feelings cross with newer studio revelations. Scholz Vinall experiments with stretching her paintings in ways that still allow the materiality of the canvas and calico to be visible, through her utilisation of crease marks and frayed edges. She also experiments with some more sketch-like mark making where she depicts previous paintings and textiles that were bundled up in her studio.
The accumulation of colour and marks in her paintings evoke a sense of the layering of multiple paths travelled and moved through by people, critters and matter within a local environment. Her process of making in the studio is intuitive, wherein she pays attention to matter, light, shadow and changes in atmosphere. Allowing ideas of the home and environments to seep through into her work through material play.
This attunement to the subtleties of matter, experience and the environment can be seen in the Scholz Vinall’s series of organic and textured vessels. Reoccurring gestures and imperfect surfaces contain a sense of the process of making, wherein you can see evidence of the artist’s sculpting of the clay. These irregular forms investigate this sense of echoing paths within a three dimensional space.
