letter from home - Out of Bounds 2022, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA)
Luisa Hansal and Tamara Marrington’s creative and personal relationship was formed when the two lived together in a share house in Melbourne.
Their collaboratively-formed paintings are a homage to friendship, to the ties of connection and affection that draw people together and keep them in each other’s orbit across distance and time.
With each painting referring to music, poetry and personal musings or witticisms, each work stands alone as a spark of mutual understanding and shared experiences. The series is also a material and conceptual challenge from one artist to another. Starting from a series of rules – ‘Have the phrase “Ghosts appear mostly in February” in mind as you paint, stick with a 10”x12” size format, only paint with oil paints, and only use these colours: yellow, indigo, Tasman blue & white’ – each artist would begin a canvas and send it to the other to work on before returning it again. Eventually a new rule was added – ‘Drop one of the colours used in the previous painting and add another’. Presented as a complete series, a gradient emerges as a record of the changing nature of relationships, but also of their endurance despite the fluctuations of time and place.
- Miranda Johnson