Jane Guthleben / Bachelor of Fine Arts
Suspend
2014
Oil on plywood
120cm x 180cm x 12cm
Jane Guthleben’s work explores themes of materialism and waste through the lens of still life. It combines the traditional tableau of still life painting with sculpture and assemblage to create an immersive fantasy world where objects arrange themselves into new living forms. This window into the ‘life’ of objects was inspired by Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, a political ecology of things, which asserts that matter has power to assemble and act, and that we are drawn to its thing-power. The paintings form an assemblage that continues our immersion in things.