2017 Tatiara Art Prize Winner

Anna HORNE ​

(Adelaide, South Australia)

​

Black #2

2017, concrete, steel, rope, paint
110 x 30 x 75 (cm)

acquired by Tatiara District Council 

 

Through repeated contact with ‘things’, we have a certain expectation of how they will behave. Bringing a full cup to our lips, lifting a stack of books, sinking down into a soft couch, we faithfully approach these endeavors with an understanding of the way our bodies, and minds, will relate to matter upon meeting it.

We do not even need to touch a marble sculpture - we recall previous encounters - and can imagine the cool, firm surface beneath our fingers. It is with this expectation that Anna Horne delights in interfering. The Adelaide-based artist creates a delay in the reading, a lingering moment of miscommunication between object and viewer.

Black #2 exists in this precarious state. It possesses both an intense physicality and a concealed energy. Suspended from the ceiling, it is at once soft and hard, light and heavy, and we carry this sense of tension with us as we navigate the work.

Industrial techniques such as fabricators are relied upon sparingly as Horne prefers to use her own hands in a manner that allows for a ‘certain amount of individuality and emotion to find its way into the work’. However, Horne has utilised a welder to make the frame for the work (think of it like a frame for a painting).

In Horne’s evolving visual language, the disagreement between expected and actual behaviour increasingly evokes the fragility of the lines we set between one thing and another. It is within those lingering moments it takes us to ‘understand’ the materiality of Horne’s sculptures that we think on how easily the definitions of the things around us are open to change.