For her second solo exhibition at Mary Cherry, Beth Arnold brings together low-fired ceramics and bioplastic sheet sculptures in an installation to be moved through. ‘Soft Frequencies’ explores the quiet exchanges between materials, bodies and spaces; light filtering through layered colour, air moving through porous surfaces and the overlap between making and home.
‘Soft Frequencies’ begins with looking. Children hold coloured sheets up to the light and the world shifts. Branches turn blue, the edge of a leaf catches purple, the grass turns yellow. Talk turns to colours other creatures see, while Corellas call from the tree overhead. Over the past year, Arnold has collaborated with children on projects in specific places. This has expanded her curiosity and wonder in interacting with the physical world. That curiosity carries into the exhibition using primary colours, soft round forms and interactions created through installation.
Arnold's practice is informed by building a home on Gunaikurnai Country, where she lives. The works were made at the kitchen table, outside and around children. The ceramic forms are made from clay sourced from her surrounds, mixed with wood dust from sanding window frames. Low-fired, they are soft in form, and porous in body. The material changes colour as it is heated, holding a record of that transformation and the relation between the clay body, its minerals and the heat.
Clay is usually read as solid and fixed, however here it is soft and porous, behaving more like soft architecture - adaptive, responsive, held rather than fixed. For Arnold, this softness carries a sense of time and changeability, and of the place and climate the clay comes from. The ceramic pieces are suspended, creating a tension between rod and form. Alongside them are agar-agar sheets, which began as a modification of a children's bioplastic recipe. They extend Arnold's fascination with light shifting through layered colour and the effect of looking through different materials, such as cellophane held up to the sky. The sheets act as membranes and filters, a way of encountering light and air. Scaled up and layered, they appear rolled, unfurled and somewhere in between, each channelling light differently.
Arnold is drawn to textures, and to the way air travels through and around materials as it is transmitted and received. Across the exhibition there is a shared fragility. Each work has been left once it found its form, without being overworked, keeping its own particular quality. In ‘Soft Frequencies’, what begins with clay, sawdust and a children's recipe becomes an environment of light, colour and gentle transmission.