Review of Fred Fisher exhibition at Design Centre

Title: Sculpture – Fred Fisher
Dates: 26 October 26 to 19 November 2007
Venue/Gallery: Design Centre, Launceston, Tasmania
Reviewer: Seán Kelly

Fred Fisher's exhibition - Sculpture, provides an rare opportunity, not only to encounter a significant body of his unique work, but also to see how the exhibition program of the Design Centre is extending into exciting territory. Housing the Tasmanian Wood Collection, perceptions of the Centre are still formulated around the principle of fine examples of Tasmanian artisanship and design in precious, even revered, woods.

Fred Fisher's exhibition breaks that mould in its use of painted MDF and its purely sculptural concerns. Whilst rigour and consummate craft skills are to be valued they may often be employed in the service of limited ideas and questionable design values. We may marvel at the ingenuity and skill levels Fisher attains but they are always integral to the extraordinary sculptural qualities of his work. His capacity to envision and fabricate complex and tantalising objects demonstrates a level of conceptual development of three dimensional form which is rare and exquisite.

Works such as Coil create an immediate engagement through their powerful presence. It is a sinuous, growing form, drawing the viewer in and around, directing the eye up in a dynamic and active relationship. Closer reading engages one in an inter-weaving of parts which seem to flow through the sculpture in impossible ways, defying the nature of the material through the massing of many component parts into complex, fluid forms.

In much of Fisher's work the richness of the visual experience is heightened by the bold use of two opposing colours, or black and white, creating optical effects which amplify and extend the formal components and spatial relationships, as exemplified by works such as Black Relief , Stack and Variation 2.

The power of Fisher's work derives from the sound visual, (and mathematical), principles which underpin it all and the concordance of idea, form and articulation - rigourously maintained in its development and realisation. Few artists have the capacity to conceive such complexity in three dimensions and to balance the various elements so acutely.

The installation in the large Design Centre  gave appropriate space to each work so that it could fully activate its immediate space yet be viewed as part of a process of investigation of form and visual sensation. The experience truly becomes as much about how we perceive as what we perceive.

National Sculptural Prize and Exhibition 2005
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Catalogue
Extracts

‘Similarly, the form of Fred Fisher’s Tilt is ambiguous, the optically charged surface of the work challenging the limitations of visual perception and disrupting our expectation of a rational relationship between structure and surface.’
Elana Taylor
Curator of Australian Painting and Sculpture

From a distance the rippled edge of Tilt creates a shimmer reminiscent of an object in a hot, arid landscape. As the sculpture is approached the landscape closes to a small, rich visual field where the eye is required to explore the object to gather information for cognitive interpretation. In the publication Pedagogical sketchbook, Paul Klee says: ‘The limitation of the eye is its inability to see even a small surface equally sharp at all points. The eye must “graze” over the surface, grasping sharply portion after portion, to convey them to the brain which collects and stores the impressions”.

The optical nature of this sculpture is part of an enquiry into the processes and conventions of geometric abstraction. Tilt has no distinct relationship with a grid or pictorial plane, and was developed from a line of double curvature drawn on a board where the side of the board represents gravity, and the base of the board the horizon. Through form and weight Tilt has chosen its own place of rest and does not have a predetermined top and bottom, sides, or front and back.

I am interested in the process of sculpture, how it is made. I am also interested in the transmission of ideas and the development of rules, protocols and language within visual practice. Part of this is the definition of difference between an object and picture plane, and how this difference marks the territory between sculpture and other visual arts activity.

Fred Fisher