WITHDRAWALS AND PROLONGATIONS by Anabelle Lacroix

‘I would prefer for this note not to be read or, if skimmed, that it be forgotten.’

My first encounter with Félicia Atkinson’s work was through a collection of images on the page. Immediately, for me, these images recalled Mallarme’s poem; spatial, rhythmic, poetic, with surrounding silence (the emptiness of negative space).

An exhibition by Félicia Atkinson is a window through which the artist’s texts, music, composition and visual essays come into and out of alignment for our eyes and ears. It is a modular event, produced from numerous smaller events in motion. It’s an antiphony. Each part answers or echo another. A mise-en-phrase; audio-visual language staged and timed. But stretched.

‘Stick or Stone,’ the title of this exhibition, is named for a track on Atkinson’s new album, Hand in Hand and presents new works developed along the continuum of the artist’s practice, infused with research on Australian native plants, and reflecting her process of making, reading and recording at Bundanon and on the Australian East Coast.

Félicia comments, ‘my studio is nomadic and swallows the landscape it crosses’. Hers is an artistic appetite marked by openness to more-than-human relations, between us and landscapes and plants, to the connections that exist beyond the ordinary binaries of stasis and movement, sound and silence, physical and psychological, terrestrial and cosmic, present and science-fictional time. Not A, nor B, Félicia’s work is abstract, making spaces that remain porous and relational. She never provides a straight answer, instead inviting the audience to take a dérive or a drift in space and through the mind.

Félicia Atkinson was born in Paris in 1981 and lives in Rennes, France. She works in painting, drawing, sculpture, text, noise, landscape, abstraction and poetry inspired by her travels. Atkinson also creates electronic music and co-publishes the independent imprint Shelter Press/curatorial platform Argument with Bartolomé Sanson. She has exhibited her work widely in group and solo shows across Europe, Mexico, and the United States. She attended l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris.

Curated by Anabelle Lacroix

STICK AND STONE and accompanying publication, AMBIENT PARK published by SHELTER PRESS were developed while on residency at BUNDANON TRUST. Opening Performance by Félicia Atkinson, Thursday 3 August, 6.30 – 7pm

BLINDSIDE Sound Series 2017 is a Liquid Architecture project supported by Institut Français and Bundanon Trust.

Print material designed by U-P