Stories in Bone

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Tags: summer-2012

Linde Ivimey 'The Four Horsemen' 2006 Various media Red 144 x 45 x 40 cm;; white 140 x 49 x 100 cm;; grey 156 x 44 x 159 cm;; black 140 x 43 x 50 cm Private collection Reproduced courtesy of the artist, Martin Browne Contemporary, Sydney, Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane and Gould Galleries, Melbourne

Sculptures inspired by the centenary of Sir Douglas Mawson’s expedition to Antarctica are the most recent works produced by Australian sculptor Linde Ivimey.

Linde Ivimey’s series Ice Warriors was inspired by her journey to Antarctica on the Orion in December 2011, resulting in works – made in fabric, bones and other materials – that evoke the bitter conditions experienced by Mawson and his fellow Antarctic explorers, and their capacity for physical endurance.

The Ice Warriors sculptures are included in the exhibition If Pain Persists: Linde Ivimey Sculpture, which is currently on display at the UQ Art Museum and surveys the works produced by Linde Ivimey over the past decade.

Sydney based Linde Ivimey is known for constructing figures and animals with materials such as skin, bone, fabric, hair, wax, gemstones, teeth, and other personal and found objects, often to great emotional effect.

“With their crude fibre stuffing, coarse hessian clothing and body parts and armature made from animal bones, Ivimey’s figures contain a sense of mystical forces outside our comprehension,” Dr Campbell Gray, Director, UQ Art Museum said.

“The overtly religious titles of many of the sculptures – and the inclusion of personal relics on, and sometimes inside, the works – encourages an understanding of Ivimey’s idiosyncratic spirituality, while one steadily becomes aware that buried out of sight are tokens that connect the artist with significant events in her life,” he said.

Exhibition curator Louise Martin-Chew describes how the faces of her creatures, often without features, and her source materials – bone, teeth and skin, and fabrics stained and aged like reliquaries – recall fetish figures from Indigenous cultures, particularly those of African and North American origin.

“Such a quality of magical transformation is intrinsic to many of Ivimey’s sculptures, particularly as it is manifested through her practice of secreting a personally meaningful object – such as an egg, a key, money, clothing, teeth or another object relevant to the subject – inside each work she makes,” she said.

One of the themes explored in the exhibition, Saints and Sinners, revolves around Ivimey’s interest in Jewish and Christian stories, including the Old Testament.
Child’s Play deals with subjects of birth, childhood, adolescence, and the way knowledge is passed between generations; and Self Portraits notes the influence of personal appearance on identity and self-esteem.

“Like her creations, Linde Ivimey’s artistic genesis has been unusual, a path strewn with difficulties,” Ms Martin-Chew said.

“Embedded in her work is the experience and strength gathered from facing and overcoming a series of personal challenges throughout her life.”

Ivimey said the works had a chronology and were used very much as a diary.

“They are a way of reconciling what has been happening with me, my body, my life,” she said.

This new survey exhibition will showcase developments since Ivimey’s first major exhibition at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, in 2003.

The first major publication on the artist’s work, entitled Linde Ivimey Sculpture and authored by Louise Martin-Chew, will be launched with the exhibition.

Louise Martin-Chew received a Visual Arts Board/Australia Council grant to research and write on Linde Ivimey’s work.

The exhibition continues until March 24 2013. For more information visit www.artmuseum.uq.edu.au

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