Louise Paramor Jane Devery
> Louise Paramor Divine Assembly #5 2018, installation view, Sacred Heart Convent, Ballarat
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2. Charles Baudelaire, ‘On Wine and Hashish’, in Charles Baudelaire, Artificial Paradises, trans. Stacy Diamond, Citadel Press, New York, 1996, p. 7.
1. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Volume 4 1938–1940, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2003, p. 48.
3. Louise Paramor, artist statement, 2017
‘Ragpicker and poet: both are concerned with refuse,’1 so wrote Walter Benjamin, invoking Charles Baudelaire’s chiffonier, an itinerant figure in 19th century Paris who gleaned and sorted through the debris of the city. An emblematic figure of modernity and metaphor for the poet, the rag-picker, as Baudelaire saw it, was ‘responsible for gathering up the daily debris of the capital. All that the city has rejected, all that it has lost, shunned, disdained, broken, this man catalogues and stores…. like a miser hoarding treasure, he gathers the refuse that has been spit out by the god of Industry, to make of it objects of delight or utility’.2 Something of a contemporary rag-picker, Louise Paramor finds latent potential in a material that is omnipresent in our daily lives: plastic. Over the past fifteen years, the Melbournebased artist has been sourcing and stockpiling brightly coloured plastic items and repurposing them into lively sculptural assemblages. She has sorted, upended, jerry-rigged and jammed together a miscellanea of cheap plastic kitsch sourced from junk piles, hard waste collections, two-dollar shops and industrial waste recycle centres. Exploiting the aesthetic and associative potential of plastic as a material, Paramor translates into three-dimensional form her understanding of contemporary urban life, mindful of the ways that architecture and industrial design relate to human experience in the 21st Century, as she once remarked: What makes these works distinctly of our time are the materials employed – industrial plastics, which are widely used in the manufacturing world. These plastics are especially tactile and often lurid in colour— characteristics which, not surprisingly, evoke an irresistible sense of play … I have embraced the physicality of this “stuff” to create dynamic, anthropomorphic works that also offer viewers an opportunity for reflection on our wider built environment.3
Although she also works in two-dimensional forms, including collage and photography, Paramor’s practice is firmly based in the sculptural. Her works are sometimes small and maquette-like or monumental in scale, as in the case of her well-known public art commission Panorama Station on the Peninsula Link Freeway in Melbourne’s southeast. In many instances, her sculptures are made in series and with specific sites and contexts in mind. Divine Assembly #5 2018, for example, is one of a series of seven large sculptures that she first exhibited in 2019 in the Sacred Heart Chapel Convent in Ballarat, in regional Victoria. With its stack of heavy-duty plastic hot pink discs perched precariously on one corner of a bright green base, it asserted an exuberant presence in dialogue with its equally bold sculptural companions in the austere church interior. Like many of her sculptures, Divine Assembly #5 has an improvisational air that stems from her intuitive working process based on continual experimentation and trial and error. Yet the results of Paramor’s labours are always carefully considered assemblies where the remnants of industrial processes are reinscribed with new values and transformed into joyful agglomerations of the consumer world.
Louise Paramor Panorama Station 2013 Collection of Southern Way, Southern Way McClelland Commission Major Work
