Posted Away
Away, away, for I will fly to thee … on viewless wings…1 Violet Shum, Change and Flow 2018, Iron, 15 x 10 x 8.5 cm The Paddock: Posted to Hong Kong
Here is a travelling postcard exhibition, an art project as fragile and light as a drifting cloud. It started small and has been accumulating, its drifting course mapped by whimsy, charted by chance, and borne on bonds between artists. Here, the emphasis is on sustaining a moving art platform between those of us working in abstraction. Here, we lift off and away from the ground of seeing art in terms of commodity, or artists merely as authorial innovators. The overriding idea is of simplicity and lightness of connection. Making and sharing a compact visual work is as simple as posting a postcard or posting on social media to friends / followers - from anywhere. Recent world events like the global pandemic, lockout, lockdown, loss, fire, flood, fear, and war - have altered the ways in which we move, travel, and connect with others. And yet, these same world-altering events have us returning to consider what it is that we can do, especially as artists, to engage with the world and each other in a way that is meaningful and offers critique. ‘The Paddock: Posted to …’ is a participatory and collaborative art project, linking an expanding group of artists who make abstract art – a universal visual language perhaps? In a time where worldly travel is so challenging, ‘The Paddock: Posted to…’ project transcends borders, physically and virtually, through its web of artist networks.
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From John Keats, poet, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (1819) an attempt to allude poetically to the lightness of sending postcards and of the views they inevitably contain.