Sutton Gallery is pleased to present Piece by piece, a group exhibition that brings together painting and sculpture by artists Hugo Blomley, Amanda Marburg, Madeleine Peters and Peter Robinson. This intergenerational presentation highlights four artists who distil, condense and reenact moments of transformation through a distinctive material process and idiosyncratic visual language. The ongoing reiteration of form and serial-nature of display in this exhibition fosters an environment of blurred associations or disconnections, whereby the proposed motifs may – or may not – have been dragged away from original referents. Moments and concepts are slightly varying each time, slowly reinventing their signification. It is through this sense of reconstruction that the artworks in Piece by piece begin to open new ideas about the enduring resonance of form and the shortcomings of memory.
In Amanda Marburg’s ‘Chicken Paintings’ a cast of uncanny characters emerge. The artist’s assembly of enigmatic roosters and cockerels are rendered in her signature visual idiom, first casting figurines in plasticine before depicting these models on board. Characterised by a familiarity with and affection for the subject, Marburg gleans inspiration from significant portrayals of poultry produced throughout western history painting dating as far back at the 17th century. Any historical or socio-political context surrounding the original works referenced is dislocated as she inserts each bird into her own uncanny aesthetic realm of whimsy and fantasy. This process forgoes hierarchical and temporal distinction, instead attending to the physical properties of each subject and their respective configuration.
Peter Robinson’s Defunct Mnemonics (2012) are emblematic of the Aotearoa’s based practitioner’s continued interest in subverting the authority of sculpture through material investigation. These linear pole sculptures both extend and foreshorten their repeated abstract pattern, making reference to their own repetitious and process-led construction. Consisting of a central wooden dowel encased in individual rolls of felt, each pole reiterates their relationship to their environment through varying texture, thickness, length and colour. Described as “memory devices”, Robinson’s concentrated and tactile process elicits the woodworking practices found in a traditional Māori context, through which ceremonial staffs that are activated by touch serve as prompts for memory recall. As the title would suggest, these artworks fail to catalyse instantaneous recollection, instead encouraging measured observation of latent stories and associations without conclusion.
Madeleine Peters’ work Catherine’s Handstand (2023) is a sequential reproduction of a decades-old piece of home-video footage. Translated across 48 consecutive oil paintings, the work considers painting as a devotional act fulfilled through repetition and ritual. Individually discernible hatches of oil paint render a grainy moving image across scores of panels as Peters vignettes each frame with a patient diligence. In doing so, the artist problematises the relationship between the captured image and its physical reproduction.
Hugo Blomely’s series Regressions (2024) features four perforated vessels of modest stature that punctuate the gallery as idle satellites. The artist’s hard-edged sculptures thwart simple recognition, invoking the sincere and frugal aesthetics of machinery while vaguely suggesting a science-fiction akin corporeality. Each sculpture harnesses negative space to scrutinize the properties of mass and volume that characterise three-dimensional form. Here, this paucity of internal detail suggests a hazy provenance or ahistoricity, whereby each sculpture transmits an evocation of an undigested past while presaging an unprepared future, positing a patched-together account of an unverifiable act.
Working primarily in sculpture, Hugo Blomleys practice considers the imposition of synthetic systems on existing flows of energy and meaning. His work is constructed so as to highlight what happens between the two ‘ends’ of a system: the transformation that occurs between input and output and the abstraction it generates. In turn, his work replicates and critically assesses the reduction of complex systems into simplified forms. Within this, the predicament of close examination, contemplation, and the misnomer of understanding and usefulness emerges. Blomley completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at Monash University in 2022 and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) at the Victorian College of Arts in 2020.
Amanda Marburg’s paintings emerge out of an extended studio process involving photography and model making. Drawing inspiration and source material from film, art history, cultural artefacts and paraphernalia, Marburg renders technically modest yet endearing figures in plasticine before theatrically photographing the peculiar worlds she creates against a studio backdrop. Painting directly from these photographs, a curious tension arises in Marburg’s images between the intentionally unceremonious handling of her models, mediated through the medium of photography, and the exacting realism with which her subjects are figured. Melancholic and irreverent in equal measure, Marburg’s paintings enlist and rework canonical tropes to relieve the medium from its own rigidity.
Madeleine Peters makes paintings to consider connections between images and time, doubt and longing. Drawing from found photographs, personal archives, or historical paintings – her works quietly point to various image traditions through time. Often her paintings trace a desire to see something; the source material becoming a placeholder for an unreachable image or an unrealized idea. Latent personal or historical accounts frequently steer the work. For Peters, the making of a painting connects to time in various ways: through the incorporation of the photographic, the sequencing of works, or through the painting being a physical record of its own production. Madeleine currently lives and works in Naarm/Melbourne. She received a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2022.
Widely recognised as one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s leading contemporary artists, Peter Robinson works across sculpture, drawing, printmaking and installation. With a strong focus on studio practice, he is interested in facilitating the play between order and disorder, density and lightness, dispersion and compression. Historically known for a critical exploration of identity politics, Robinson’s early artworks rigorously examined the valences and inheritances of his Māori ancestry and biculturalism. Over the past two decades, the artist has shifted from this rhetoric and weight of interpretation to focus more exclusively on opening new lines of enquiry into the materiality of the mediums with which he works, such as polystyrene, steel, and most extensively, felt. Investigating both the material and metaphoric potential of felt as a medium, Robinson’s recent practice explores the resulting poetic nuances of his material investigation while proposing art history as an open language that develops and adapts via its own twisting web of cause and effect.
Amanda Marburg’s profile Peter Robinson’s profile