"Diversion" Ham Darroch, exhibition Berlin August 2013

Diversion Ham Darroch

23 July till 3rd August 2013

Hamilton Darroch’s art frequently incorporates imagery and objects from the mundane in everyday life – household tools, implements and appliances. Taking his cue it seems from the precepts of pop art, with its focus on popular culture and mass production in reaction against the western fine art tradition, Darroch has remade and represented things from the quotidian world of work and domesticity. However, unlike much pop art that celebrates the tawdry glamour of advertising, his sculptural objects are more homely, at least in their origins.

Darroch’s works that take as their starting point shovels and vacuum cleaners and rabbit traps are variously carved and painted or salvaged, and revel in their rough surfaces and rusted patina. While living in London some years ago the artist recovered old, ruined tools from the littoral of the Thames and fixed them to new handles, which he carefully and precisely painted in squares and stripes, evoking twentiethcentury geometric abstraction. This intriguing conjunction of assemblage and reductive abstract art is also the essence of Diversion, a wall sculpture composed of half-adozen ancient worn and corroded rabbit traps in a straight linear arrangement, their bait plates painted in simple combinations of blue and red forming a progressive geometric pattern across the work, like a sequence of signal flags.

The red and blue together create a colour vibration that animates the rusted metal contraptions, giving Diversion an almost kinetic quality; this suggestion of movement amplifies the tension already generated by the sinister nature of the traps, which yawn open as if poised to be sprung. The work is mysterious, resisting a

straightforward reading, yet the juxtaposition of its slightly incongruous elements seems to promise some kind of narrative, driven by the signals and patterns within its surface.

While Diversion’s strong primary colours in their geometric compositions suggest hard-edge painting, there is also a relationship with the intense colours and simple forms of Sidney Nolan’s figurative painting. The vivid blue and red of Diversion is present in the poignant Nolan work Hare in trap 1946, where the animal is caught in a trap such as those in the Darroch work, and the brilliant blue of its startled eye is countered by a spray of red blood spots like eyeballs on the ground around its stretched form.

A recent work by Darroch, Moon Boy (after Nolan), recreated on a shovel that artist’s famous 1939 yellow silhouette painting, Moonboy (also known as Boy and the moon), a work that hovers between abstraction and representation. This is a condition of Darroch’s art, in the almost-figurative shovels and traps with their enigmatic past and spirited grunge poetry, now crisply dressed in the raiments of modernist abstraction; the tension is present and buoyant and dynamic, animating the works without explaining them away.

Deborah Clark Senior Curator of Visual Art at the Canberra Museum and Gallery, Canberra, Australia Canberra, July 2013

Ham Darroch Diversion, 2012 Casin on Rabbit Traps H 96 cm x W 191.5 cm x D 5 cm (installed)

Ham Darroch Ham Darroch (*1972) is an Australian artist working in sculpture, performance and drawing. His work references traditional methods of making that show a playful, subtle and at the same time critically–founded treatment of everyday objects.

His imagery in universal evoking shared histories and experiences, place, and perception,while his performances create interactions with the public to investigate various tensions between the physical and psychological.

In early 2006, he completed an MFA (research) COFA University of New South Wales and in 1997 a Bachlor of Arts from Australian National University.

In 2002, he received a New Work Grant from Australia Council for the Arts and in 2000, a Development Grant from Arts ACT. From 2006-2009 he lived in London and has worked as an assistant to Bridget Riley.

23 July till 3rd August 2013