PIA VAN GELDER
/ WORK / CREATIVE WORK:
Recumbent Circuit, 2016
Primavera 2016: Young Australian Artists, curated by Emily Cormack
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney AustraliaVideography by Kate Blackmore
Pia van Gelder’s Recumbent Circuit (2015/16) is activated and controlled by the body’s energy transmitted through contact. Embedded within the skin, the nervous system is electric, and in turn has an innate capacity to conduct electricity. Called electrodermal activity (EDA), it is this that van Gelder uses to generate an electrical charge. The conductivity of the skin works in tandem with the nervous system, each informing and influencing the other. If, for example, the largely unconscious autonomic nervous system is activated, it affects the skin’s conductivity. So just as the nervous system informs us about our physical environment, so too does the body’s EDA become a measure of our emotional or physiological well-being.
About the Exhibition:
Primavera 2016: Young Australian Artists presented the work of eight young Australian artists whose work highlighted the ways in which art can connect physically with the viewer, and how an artwork’s meaning can be generated by this bodily encounter. The exhibition drew on theories about ‘embodied cognition’, a rapidly expanding field of cognitive science (the study of thought, learning and mental organisation) which puts forward the argument that the creation of knowledge might first begin in the body rather than the brain.
All of the artworks in Primavera 2016 were created especially for the exhibition. They all invited the viewer to experience them through a range of senses – not just vision – and through bodily actions such as breathing or felt sensations. In the exhibition, we breathed art into our bodies, mirrored it in our muscles and generated it using our bodies’ own radiant energy. The works were incomplete until the audience physically interacted with them.
Primavera 2016 imagined the gallery space as a body, with each artist representing a bodily system: respiratory, sensory, skeletal, muscular, endocrine (the collection of glands that regulate our metabolism, growth and development) and limbic. The exhibition began with the breath and ended with that most complex of all, the brain – the limbic system – that controls our instincts and our moods.
Primavera is the Museum’s annual exhibition of Australian artists aged 35 years and under. Since 1992, the series has showcased the works of artists in the early stages of their career, many of whom have gone on to exhibit nationally and internationally.
Primavera was initiated in 1992 by Dr Edward Jackson AM and Mrs Cynthia Jackson AM and their family in memory of their daughter and sister Belinda, a talented jeweller who died at the age of 29.
More about the exhibition and museum
Photographs by Jacqui Manning and Christopher Snee. Videography by Kate Blackmore.