Sculpture through Photography

Lit from the Top:

Sculpture through Photography

Paul Adair
Fleur van Dodewaard
Andrew Hazewinkel
Georgia Hutchison & Arini Byng
Stéphanie Lagarde
Stein Rønning
Curated by Laura Lantieri and Sarah Wall

Publication Sponsor Fleur van Dodewaard

From the series 131 Variations 2013
inkjet print
30 × 25 cm
Fleur van Dodewaard, Paul Adair,
Stéphanie Lagarde and Georgia
Hutchison & Arini Byng
Lit from the Top: Sculpture
through Photography
installation view, Centre for

2
Contemporary Photography
Photo: J Forsyth
3
Foreword Naomi Cass
Director

In reading the illuminating introduction to this exhibition by curators, Laura

Lantieri and Sarah Wall, I am reminded how interesting and challenging is the
curatorial process: one of looking and listening, reading and returning to look
again and again. How deftly the curators have engaged a wonderful selection of
Australian and international artists in an exploration of the relationship between
sculpture and photography. I acknowledge and thank the artists, Paul Adair, Fleur
van Dodewaard, Stein Rønning, Andrew Hazewinkel, Stéphanie Lagarde and
Georgia Hutchison and Arini Byng.
At its best, curating is a deeply intuitive and iterative process, which
seeks to draw a miraculous thread from the heart of an artist’s work to that
of a notional visitor to the exhibition. CCP’s guest curators have done well in
this as well as in the myriad of more prosaic tasks that constitute this curious
profession, such as negotiating skills, contractual work, scheduling, and raising
funds, to name a few. Karra Rees, CCP Managing Curator, has journeyed with
Lantieri and Wall to ensure a significant outcome for artists and visitors. With
generous support from the Gordon Darling Foundation, the exhibition’s thread
now extends into history through this catalogue, designed by Joseph Johnson,
CCP Designer.
CCP is grateful to all who have supported Lit from the Top: Sculpture
through Photography. I acknowledge lenders to the exhibition, the artists and The
University of Queensland Art Museum and thank them for their faith in lending
work from the Collection to a contemporary art space. Many individuals and
companies have enabled the work to be printed and I gratefully acknowledge
Ilford and PICTO, Paris.
Financial assistance has been given by the Gordon Darling Foundation;
the Office for Contemporary Art, Norway; the French Government through
the Consulat Général de France; NAVA through The Australian Artists’ Grant;
and the City of Yarra. CCP is grateful for this critical support without which
the exhibition would not have been possible.
Raking light refers to the use of light from an oblique, almost parallel
source in the examination and photography of an object, a term used primarily in
the conservation of works of art. A memorable curated exhibition is one where
the curator’s theme casts a gentle raking light, enabling both artists and visitors
to see in a new light, as it does in this exhibition.

Stéphanie Lagarde
Stare 2013
1 from a series of 6 photographs

4
latex ink print on paper
230 × 164.3 cm
Introduction Laura Lantieri and Sarah Wall

The photography of sculpture produces a fundamental cognitive and spatial

shift. The transformation of sculpture to image, from a three-dimensional form
which can be circumnavigated to a two-dimensional plane, brings a different set
of conditions under which we encounter an artwork. It directs our attention to
inside the frame, to scrutinise the configurations that lie within. These altered
terms of engagement also invite a tactile imagination, to visualise something
beyond the parameters of the image – to the maker’s hands, the materials and
their handling, whether it is to cast, build, drape, cut or fold.
Lit from the Top: Sculpture through Photography started out as an investigation
into how artists seek to present sculpture through the medium of photography,
and how photography, in turn, shapes the way we perceive sculpture. As the
exhibition developed, it naturally gravitated towards a consideration of the
‘photographic object’; how the photographic image can be pushed beyond the
picture to move between the two mediums and simultaneously occupy both.
The exhibition brings together a group of artists who work across sculptural
and photographic practices, to reflect on how they mediate and reimagine each
discipline through the prism of the other – from sculptures re-presented as
photographs, to photographs rendered as sculpture.
Since its emergence in the early-nineteenth century photography
has captivated artists working in a variety of mediums, with the sculptor in
particular often adopting the photograph as a means to record their work in
the environment of the studio. It wasn’t until the 1960s and 70s, however, when
conceptual artists turned to photography that the medium came into its own.
As artists during these decades began conceiving time-based, performative
and site-specific projects, they increasingly incorporated photography within
their practice as a way to document ephemeral works of art.1

1 A number of publications
have focused on sculpture’s (and
sculptors’) relationship to photography,
particularly since the late 1990s.
Amongst the focus of such publications
have been the artists Auguste Rodin,
Constantin Brancusi and Medardo
Rosso. See, for example, Geraldine
Johnson, ed., Sculpture and Photography:
Envisioning the Third Dimension
(Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), and the catalogue, The
Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture,
1839 to Today (New York: Museum of 2 Photography into Sculpture,

6
Modern Art, 2010), accompanying the Curator: Peter C. Bunnell, MoMA
exhibition of the same name. (8 April – 5 July 1970).
The progressive hybridisation of the two mediums was encapsulated in the
seminal 1970 exhibition, Photography into Sculpture, held at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York, which at the time was considered radical for openly challenging
medium specificity and ‘purity’.2 In the decades since a continuous and marked
shift has taken place, from a utilitarian, documentary view towards thinking
about the photograph as a site for ‘sculptural activity’.3
Lit from the Top aims to extend this dialogue on the intersections
of sculpture and photography in contemporary art. It charts a number of
interrelating ideas, spanning object- and image-making, materiality, authorship,
and the movement between two- and three-dimensional space. Taking its title
from a sculptural-photographic study by Sol LeWitt,4 the exhibition includes
recent work by seven Australian and international artists who similarly explore
the intrinsic qualities of both photography and sculpture, and the creative
possibilities that emerge between the two.
Directly inspired by LeWitt’s serial investigations, Fleur van Dodewaard’s
131 Variations (2013) is a reinterpretation of his Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes
(1974).5 Configured in a vast grid, Lit from the Top marks only the second time
this work has been installed in its entirety. In 131 Variations, the conceptual
rigour of LeWitt’s objective is disrupted by van Dodewaard’s free appropriation.
Embracing throwaway studio materials and the arbitrary as opposed to LeWitt’s
own sleek white cubes and regulated method, van Dodewaard presents new
translations of the original in moving from one medium to the other.
Stein Rønning, who has explored tenets of conceptual minimalism since the
early 1980s, similarly rejects the ‘sheen’ of the industrially fabricated in favour of the
handmade. Motivated by ‘place, proportions and material’,6 his recent photographic

3 This shift has been a focus of a

number of recent exhibitions, most
prominently the aforementioned The
Original Copy, MoMA, in 2010. Other
exhibitions include Image into Sculpture
at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in
2013, and The Camera’s Blind Spot I
and The Camera’s Blind Spot II, held at
the Museo D’Arte della Provincia di
Nuoro and the Kunsthal Antwerpen
in 2013 and 2015 respectively.
Chris Riley has written on new 4 A Sphere Lit From the Top, Four
approaches towards and changing Sides, and Their Combinations (2004).
views of photography as a site 5 An investigation LeWitt
for ‘sculptural activity’ in ‘Depth developed, incidentally, in part out of

7
of Focus,’ Frieze, 143 (November- his interest in the serial photographic
December 2011). studies of Eadweard Muybridge.
series Renient (2014) depicts delicately stacked blue boxes which he carefully crafted
in wood, photographed and then digitally re-worked. The arresting, landscape-like
arrangements engage the material and spatial concerns of sculpture, pointing to
Rønning’s ‘aim to [manifest] the photograph as
pure physical presence in front of the viewer.’7
The past and the present coalesce in
the black-and-white photographs of Andrew
Hazewinkel and Stéphanie Lagarde. Modelled on
a Donatello bust of Niccolò da Uzzano, Andrew
Hazewinkel’s photographic installation, 7 portraits
[after Niccolò]: studies in collective resilience (2015),
continues his exploration into the relations
between sculpture and photography, and the
connections between memory, materials and
perception. Displayed as a suite of seven life-
size portraits surrounded by a series of small
dark vignettes, their striking lighting, close
framing and facial nuances determine how
we approach their personal topographies as
viewers, highlighting the discursive quality of
the photographic medium.
Sharing Hazewinkel’s interest in
memory and materiality, Stéphanie Lagarde’s
2013 series, Stare, also takes the Renaissance as
its starting point. The three imposing wallpaper prints in Lit from the Top form
tactile doorways into the artist’s studio, in which we find the Pietà, an icon of
Renaissance art, restaged using wooden props and heavy silicone drapery. The
play of surface textures and studio lighting dramatise the intense physicality of
the sculptural works, which now appear before us as flattened, two-dimensional
forms. Progressing from painting to sculpture to photography, what remains
in Lagarde’s final iteration is a feeling of absence and presence, weight and
resistance, and an underlying tension between image and object.

6 Stein Rønning, in conversation

with the authors, March 2015.
7 Quoted from the exhibition
website: Stein Rønning: Hierlieu,
Stein Ronning Curator: Ida Kierulf, Kunsternes Hus
Renient II 2014 (14 March – 27 April 2014) (http://

8
inkjet print www.kunstnerneshus.no/kunst/
41 x 30.3 cm stein-ronning-3/).
Georgia Hutchison and Arini Byng map the fertile ground of the studio as a space
for sculptural investigation in their two-part installation of the photographic
print, Palaces (2014), and planar tableaux, Palaces II (2015). A new work created
purposely for this exhibition, Palaces II marks the ultimate collaboration for
the duo, who have worked together on still-life photography since 2012.
Converting commonplace and cast-off materials into playful, painterly and
abstract compositions, Hutchison and Byng’s photographic image-making
places an emphasis on issues of material, form, colour and gesture, conceiving
the photograph as a sculptural site.
Interested in the photographic capacity of sculpture, Paul Adair departs
from photographing objects to pulling them ‘out of the photograph and into
the gallery space itself ’.8 For his hyper-real sculptural works, Light bulb and
Wet Mirror (both 2011), Adair removed the domestic items from their everyday
settings and refabricated them in different materials before introducing them
into the gallery. Taking into account the two mediums’ corresponding processes
– such as copying and reproduction – he moves beyond thinking about an
image as a strictly two-dimensional entity. Proposing the three-dimensional

Andrew Hazewinkel
8 Paul Adair, in an interview 7 portraits [after Niccolò]: studies in
with Laura Lantieri, ‘Deceptive collective resilience 2015
Realities: On Convergence and installation view, Centre for

9
Contradiction’, Excerpt Magazine, Contemporary Photography
30 September 2013. Photo: J Forsyth
Stéphanie Lagarde
Stare 2013
installation view, Centre for

10
Contemporary Photography
Photo: J Forsyth
11
object as image, Adair challenges systems of cognition and recognition, and
the ambivalent relationship between the real and its imitation.
The artists in Lit from the Top variously highlight the productive interplay
between sculpture and photography as complementary creative disciplines.
Regardless of subject or support their works are connected by a shared interest
in the materials, techniques and actions of both mediums. Whether looking at
sculpture through photography or photography via sculpture, these artists
negotiate a number of overlapping conceptual and formal concerns; from
the original and the replica, object-hood, materiality and notions of (real or
imagined) space, to processes of reinterpretation and displacement. Often with
a nod to art history, each medium is here translated, revised and renewed by
the other, as these artists communicate in a distinct and ever-evolving visual
language within contemporary thinking and practice.

Stein Rønning and Georgia Hutchison Page 13:

& Arini Byng Paul Adair and Andrew Hazewinkel
Lit from the Top: Sculpture through Lit from the Top: Sculpture through
Photography Photography
installation view, Centre for installation view, Centre for

12
Contemporary Photography Contemporary Photography
Photo: J Forsyth Photo: J Forsyth
Paul b. 1982, Gold Coast, Australia
Adair Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia

Whether beach balls, bar stools or coffee cups, quotidian objects have
consistently formed the subjects of Paul Adair’s work across sculpture and
photography. Employing unlikely yet immediately identifiable objects re-cast
as art, Adair explores the tensions and slippages that occur between truth and
artifice, object and image. Initially creating sculptures explicitly to photograph
them, in recent years Adair has reversed his line of enquiry, beginning with a
photographic logic (of copying, reproducing and multiplying) and ending with
sculptural outcomes, typically in the form of hyper-real cast replicas.
In Light bulb and Wet Mirror (both 2011), Adair takes and reproduces
everyday items – quite literally a light bulb and a mirror – and repositions
them in the gallery. Machined from aluminium, Light bulb suspends from the
ceiling while Wet Mirror unassumingly rests on the floor. At first glance, these
objects seem to be precisely what they appear; until we notice the globe shines
of metal, not glass, and the ‘water droplets’ sprayed across the mirror’s surface
are in fact resin-formed substitutes. Employing reflective materials of aluminum
and mirrored glass, Adair activates these three-dimensional objects as sites
that hold an image akin to the photographic print. Yet the image itself is in a
constant state of flux. It shifts according to each viewer’s physical encounter
with the object, effectively obfuscating the point at which an object becomes an
image, and vice versa. Not concerned with his own hand in the creative process,
Adair raises questions of appropriation and authorship in interrogating how we
ascribe meaning to an object, and place value on an original versus its copy.

Paul Adair received a Master of Fine Arts (Research) from the Victorian
College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, Australia, in 2011. Recent solo
exhibitions include: Circle Jerks, Bus Projects, Melbourne, Australia (2013); Let’s
See What Happens, Ryan Renshaw Gallery, Brisbane, Australia (2012); and A.S.S.
(Artificial Spatial Systems), Stills Gallery, Sydney, Australia (2011). He has exhibited
at Photo LA in association with QCP (2007/2009) and was awarded an Australia
Council Studio Residency in Los Angeles, USA (2009). He was a finalist in the
Churchie National Emerging Art Prize (2013), and winner of the Artworkers
Award (2006), and the Hobday and Hington Bursary, Queensland Art Gallery,
Brisbane, Australia (2005).

Collection of The University

Light bulb 2011 of Queensland, purchased 2013
machinist: Graeme Adair Photographer: Carl Werner

14
hand-machined aluminium Image courtesy of the artist and
overall 12 × 6 × 6 cm Stills Gallery, Sydney
Fleur van b. 1983, Haarlem, the Netherlands
Dodewaard Lives and works in Amsterdam,
the Netherlands

‘I build a stage, create an object, take a picture, change the object,

take a picture…’

Fleur van Dodewaard’s work revolves around her thinking about the relationship
between an original and its translation, and ‘what happens when an original is
translated into a new original’ through a different medium. Her photographs of
highly-choreographed scenes are often serialised. Beginning with an existing
work or image – sometimes an art historical term or cliché – she re-interprets
the ‘original’, playing with materials, colour, proportions and position, before
photographing the temporary arrangements. Central to this gradual generation
and accumulation of images is the process of making, un-making and re-making.
131 Variations (2013) is a formal take on Sol LeWitt’s conceptual work,
Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes (1974). Drawing on LeWitt’s logical, mathematical
system of classification, van Dodewaard set out to replicate the project cube
for cube. Along the way, however, she found some disappeared or doubled, and
other, entirely new variants revealed themselves, resulting in 131 variations
as opposed to LeWitt’s 122. Rejecting the formal and conceptual restraints of
LeWitt’s original work, van Dodewaard’s personal re-creations are makeshift
and provisional; her favouring of the arbitrary and handmade introducing a
tactile quality to the photographic works. In van Dodewaard’s translation,
LeWitt’s ‘original’ is now several-times removed. Despite their static nature as
photographs, the subtle compositional shifts between the 131 prints arranged
in a grid convey an almost staccato-like temporal element, and suggest the
artist’s body moving the forms in the studio space.

Fleur van Dodewaard studied Theatre at the University of Amsterdam and

Fine Arts at the Royal Academy of Art, the Hague, before going on to receive
a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Photography) from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy,
Amsterdam, (all the Netherlands) in 2010. Since then, she has exhibited widely
internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include: Solo, Galerie van der Mieden,
Brussels, Belgium (2015); 131 Variations, POST Gallery, Tokyo, Japan, FOAM,
Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and Hauser Gallery, Zürich, Switzerland (all
2014); A Number of Angles, MACRO Musei d’Arte Contemporanea Roma, Rome,
Italy; and Sculptures Economiques, Subbacultcha HQ, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
(both 2013).

From the series 131 Variations 2013

16
inkjet prints
30 × 25 cm each
Andrew b. 1965, Melbourne, Australia
Hazewinkel Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia

Andrew Hazewinkel’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses sculpture, video,

photography and installation. Drawing inspiration from archaeology, geology,
and art history, Hazewinkel’s work is concerned with correspondences between
photographic and sculptural practices, memory, materials and the body. He
employs a variety of technologies and materials – chosen for their physical
properties as well as their culturally-generated qualities – in pursuing his
overarching interest in the capacity of materials to act as conduits for memory.
Challenging conventional notions of photography as a consummate mnemonic
device, he instead places an emphasis on the manner in which we approach and
understand objects, the very stuff of which they are made, and past histories.
For Lit from the Top, Hazewinkel presents a new installation of
photographs, titled 7 portraits [after Niccolò]: studies in collective resilience (2015).
The works are the outcome of a multi-layered compositional and sculptural
experiment in which Hazewinkel re-cast a nineteenth-century reproduction
of the famous Donatello bust of Niccolò da Uzzano into a series of fractured
multiples. In one respect, the antiquity-inspired Renaissance sculpture is a fine
example of pre-photographic portraiture; Niccolò’s appearance is convincingly
truthful, with the rough textures of his skin and hollow cheeks reinforcing
the portrait’s immediacy. In Hazewinkel’s versions the sensation of reality
begins to give way; each bust bears a physical imprint indicating the seams of
the silicone mould from which it was cast. This consequence of a deliberately
imprecise casting technique imparts a powerful sense of physical involvement
and plasticity, and simultaneously loads the busts with suggestions of violence,
rupture and uncertainty. Through this act of defacement, the portrait bust –
itself a long-lived sculptural trope – takes on a new life. Previously displayed as
a suite of 12 sculptures, here, transformed by the camera’s gaze, Niccolò looks
out at the viewer in a dramatic portrayal of resilience.

Andrew Hazewinkel has exhibited widely in Australia. Recently, his work has
been included in Nature/Revelation, Ian Potter Museum of Art (2015); New 14,
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art; The Piranesi Effect, Ian Potter Museum
of Art; Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria (all Melbourne, Australia,
2014). Hazewinkel was recently selected as one of two annual Australian
participants at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New
York, USA, 2015.

18
From the series 7 portraits [after Niccolo]:
studies in collective anxiety 2015

19
fibre based gelatin silver print
39.5 × 31 cm
Georgia b. 1986, Toowoomba, Australia
Hutchison b. 1987, Sydney, Australia
Both live and work in Melbourne, Australia
& Arini Byng

Working entirely in the studio, Georgia Hutchison and Arini Byng produce
enigmatic, contemporary still-life photographs using a range of industrial materials
and found objects. Removed from their original context and reassembled through
a series of spontaneous yet controlled gestures, Hutchison and Byng’s playful,
performative constructions bring to the fore concerns of space, form, framing,
light and material juxtaposition. Within their delicately poised compositions,
‘geometric volumes are carefully placed to point a finger out of the land of
sculpture and back towards painting, all the while directing our gaze through
the medium of photography.’ 1
Hutchison and Byng’s recent works, Palaces (2014) and Palaces II (2015),
continue to develop their visual lexicon. In Palaces, the artists approach the
photographic still life in abstract, fluid and painterly terms. Their arrangements
of torn, creased and cut-out papers are transformed by the camera, appearing
as a collaged landscape of surfaces and textures. As the artists’ focus shifts
from the object per se to their (choreographed) encounter with it, the image
embodies a sense of movement, time and space, contesting the traditionally-
static composition of the still life and two-dimensional photograph. This
departure from the ‘photograph of thing’ to the ‘photograph as thing’, re-
positions the medium as an object in and of itself.
This is taken a step further in Palaces II, Hutchison and Byng’s latest and
final collaborative venture created especially for this exhibition. Facemounted to
architectural glass and installed as a planar tableaux, Palaces II presents a spatial
reanimation of its two-dimensional predecessor. The 90-degree shift from image
on the wall to object on the floor underscores the artists’ procession, which
started with their compositional and sculptural ‘acts’ in the studio, followed by
photographic re-presentation, and finally, a return to three-dimensional form.

Georgia Hutchison and Arini Byng have worked collaboratively since 2012. In
2011, Hutchison received a Bachelor of Design (Industrial Design) from RMIT,
Melbourne, Australia, and in 2013 Byng completed an Honours year at the
Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, Australia, following a Bachelor of Fine
Art (Photography) at the National Art School, Sydney, Australia, in 2010. Recent
projects and exhibitions include: Adult Contemporary, Edmund Pearce, Melbourne,
Australia (2014); Printed Matter LA Art Book Fair, The Geffen Contemporary
at MOCA, Los Angeles, USA (Book Launch, 2014); Product Placement, Seventh
Gallery, Melbourne, Australia; and their sold-out publication, Moved Objects,
Perimeter Editions, Melbourne, Australia (both 2013).

20
1 Matthew Hassell, ‘Moved
Objects by Arini Byng and Georgia
Hutchison’, NY Arts Magazine, 3
December 2013; see http://www. Palaces 2014

21
nyartsmagazine.com/?p=14416, archival inkjet print
accessed 1 March 2015. 120 × 80 cm
Stéphanie b. 1982, Toulouse, France
Lagarde Lives and works in Paris, France

‘I like to be able to escape from a medium, from a meaning, from

a definition. Photography allows me to escape from the materiality
of sculpture.’

Working across a variety of mediums, central to Stéphanie Lagarde’s practice is

her ongoing engagement with the notion of displacement – of signs, images, words
and languages – from their original contexts. Her processes of transformation
and manipulation, such as cutting and pasting, assembling and collaging, are
carried out across film, photography, performance and installation. A paradoxical
vein runs through Lagarde’s work, as she adopts specific vocabularies while
simultaneously doing away with their associated rules.
Stare (from Latin, meaning ‘to stand’) is the title of Stéphanie Lagarde’s
2013 series of monumental black-and-white photographs – three of which are
included in this exhibition. Showing large folds of heavy, cast-silicone sheets
precariously draped on makeshift wooden structures, the photographs result
from her close reading of the iconography of the Pietà in Renaissance painting.
Lagarde’s fundamental concern was not with the paintings’ religious subject,
but with sculptural properties of weight, gravity and balance, and their active
resistance to collapse (effondrement).
The large-scale photographs, presented here as wallpaper, produce an
effect of trompe l’oeil – an illusionary three-dimensional space that momentarily
suspends certainty over the work’s material and physical status. Lagarde’s Pietàs
have undergone a series of displacements; from painting to sculpture, sculpture
to photography. Dematerialised into a series of disembodied ‘impressions’, they
have shaken off symbolic and historical associations.

Stéphanie Lagarde is a graduate of the Art-Space section of the École Nationale

Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, France (2008). She has exhibited in a
number of exhibitions in France and internationally, including: La Légende des
Origines, Galerie Maubert; Rancho Mirage, Galerie Perception Park (both Paris,
France, 2014); AAA CC DD EE G H IIII J KK LLL M NN OOOO RRRR U, Lucerne,
Switzerland; Mais je ne sais quel oeil par accidents nouveaux, Cargo Culte II, Jardin
d’agronomie tropicale du bois de Vincennes, Paris, France; and Meltem, Palais de
Tokyo, Paris, France (all 2013). Lagarde is currently a resident artist at the Jan
van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, the Netherlands.

Stare 2013
1 from a series of 6 photographs

22
latex ink print on paper
230 × 164.3 cm
23
Stein b. 1953, Askim, Norway
Rønning Lives and works in Oslo, Norway

For the past three decades Stein Rønning’s sculptural and photographic works
have drawn certain vocabularies from Minimalism and the Conceptual art
movement of the 1960s. Consisting of modular and monochrome geometric
constructions, rather than using industrially-produced materials and processes,
Rønning’s ongoing preoccupation lies with the handmade. In 1984 Rønning moved
away from making photographs to concentrate on sculpture, only to return to
photography some twenty years later, where he continued to employ the same
basic morphologies. In both his photographs and handcrafted wooden forms,
Rønning is concerned with issues of scale and relation, not only between his
subjects, but also between the body and hand of the artist and those of our
own as viewers.
Renient (2014) is a recent series of photographs by Rønning depicting
his carefully-considered arrangements of cubic forms. Their formal simplicity
belies the level of labour and acute precision required in their making. The
works are developed from a lengthy process which begins with Rønning
making a paper study of torn, rectangular shapes, before handcrafting them in
wood to a specific scale. Various arrangements are studied and photographed,
then digitally reworked before being printed, the cubes’ three-dimensionality
compressed into a two-dimensional space. The intricacy and intimacy of these
cubes’ making, their configuration on a surface, placement and displacement,
evokes the reciprocity between the eye and hand, sight and tactility. This
reciprocity between the haptic and the optic is important for Rønning, who
considers himself ‘more of a sculptor than a photographer, and definitely so in
the photographic work’. In looking at Rønning’s photographs, one feels their
way along and around the landscape of forms, alert to texture and variable
surfaces, rhythms and movements.

Stein Rønning has exhibited widely in Norway, and in Europe. His recent solo
exhibitions include: esplaceant (unfinished business), Galleri Riis, Oslo; Hierlieu,
Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (both Norway, 2014); and Méange, Kristiansand Kunsthall,
Kristiansand, Norway (2013). His work has also been presented in a number of
group exhibitions, most recently: Turtle, Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre, Paris, France,
and Winterstudio/Hansplassen, Kunstmuseet KUBE, Ålesund, Norway (both 2015);
Post 6790, Innkjøp - del 1, Stavanger Kunstmuseum, Stavanger, Norway; Queen´s
gambit, Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum, Tromsø, Norway (both 2014); Contract, Gallery
D.O.R., The Armory Show, New York, USA; and Carnegie Art Award, Oslo, Norway;
Stockholm, Sweden; Helsinki, Finland; and Copenhagen, Denmark (all 2012).

24
Renient I 2014

25
inkjet print
42.5 × 42 cm
List of works Acknowledgements

Paul Adair Stein Rønning The development of Lit from the Top:
Light bulb 2011 Renient I 2014 Sculpture through Photography has been
machinist: Graeme Adair inkjet print greatly assisted by the CCP staff.
hand-machined aluminium 42.5 × 42 cm We especially wish to thank Karra
overall 12 × 6 × 6 cm edition of 5 Rees, Missy Saleeba, Naomi Cass
Collection of The University Renient II 2014 and Pippa Milne, whose constant
of Queensland, purchased 2013 inkjet print hard work and infallible support
Wet Mirror 2011 41 × 30.3 cm have been invaluable. Our sincerest
mirror, polyurethane resin edition of 5 gratitude goes to Joseph Johnson, for
80 × 80 × 0.3 cm Renient III 2014 his exceptional skill and expertise in
inkjet print designing this publication.
Fleur van Dodewaard 41 × 30.4 cm For kindly making work
131 Variations 2013 edition of 5 available to the exhibition, we
inkjet prints Renient IV 2014 thank The University of Queensland
30 × 25 cm each inkjet print Art Museum, and in particular
edition of 5 + 2AP 41 × 33 cm their staff, Dr Campbell Gray, Kath
edition of 5 Kerswell and Matt Malone. We also
Andrew Hazewinkel gratefully acknowledge the support,
7 portraits [after Niccolo]: studies in All images courtesy of the artists assistance and technical know-how
collective resilience 2015 unless otherwise stated. of Marc Payet and Ross McLean of
7 fibre based gelatin silver prints Ilford/C.R. Kennedy, Cassie and the
39.5 × 31 cm each and 7 selenium team at Neo Frames, Sandy Barnard
toned fibre based gelatin silver at Sandyprints, and Nicolas Brassuer
prints 25 × 19.5 cm each and Sylvie Besnard at PICTO, Paris.
overall dimensions variable Thanks are extended to all those
edition of 3 who so generously supported
Technical collaborator: the artists and the exhibition:
Ben Stone Herbert the City of Yarra, NAVA through
Prints: Sandy Barnard, The Australian Artists’ Grant,
Sandyprints the French Government through
Consulat Général de France, the
Georgia Hutchison & Mondriaan Fund, and the Office for
Arini Byng Contemporary Art, Norway. For
Palaces 2014 their support of this publication, we
archival inkjet print thank the Gordon Darling Foundation.
120 × 80 cm Friends and colleagues have
edition of 5 variously helped in the realisation
Palaces II 2015 of this exhibition, and we personally
glass, archival inkjet print thank: Alanna Phillips, Nicola
35 × 100 × 66.6 cm Camporeale, Amy Marjoram and
Akira Akira.
Stéphanie Lagarde Finally, we would like to extend
Stare 2013 our warmest thanks to the artists
3 from a series of 6 photographs involved, for their unwavering
latex ink prints on paper commitment to this project,
230 × 164.3 cm each encouragement and enthusiasm.

26
Andrew Hazewinkel
7 portraits [after Niccolò]: studies
in collective resilience 2015 (detail)
installation view, Centre for

27
Contemporary Photography
Photo: J Forsyth
Fleur van Dodewaard, Paul Adair,
Stéphanie Lagarde, Georgia Hutchison
& Arini Byng and Stein Rønning
Lit from the Top: Sculpture through
Photography
installation view, Centre for

28
Contemporary Photography
Photo: J Forsyth
IMPRINT EXHIBITION SUPPORTERS

First published on the occasion Thank you to the generous
of the exhibition Lit from the Top: supporters of this exhibition:
Sculpture Through Photography
The Australian Artists’ Grant is Centre for Contemporary
Centre for Contemporary a NAVA initiative, made possible Photography
Photography, Melbourne through the generous sponsorship 404 George Street
24 April – 28 June 2015 of Mrs Janet Holmes à Court and Fitzroy VIC 3065, Australia
the support of the Visual Arts Board, +613 9417 1549
Curators Australia Council for the Arts. www.ccp.org.au
Laura Lantieri and Sarah Wall
CCP Managing Curator
Karra Rees
CCP Designer
Joseph Johnson
ISBN
978-0-9875976-4-9

Exhibited and published by

the Centre for Contemporary
Photography. Centre for Contemporary
Photography is supported by the
Unless otherwise noted, all Victorian Government through
quotes are from conversations Creative Victoria and is assisted
with the artists. by the Australian Government
through the Australia Council, its
principal arts funding and advisory
body. Centre for Contemporary
Photography is supported by the
Publication Sponsor Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an
initiative of the Australian, state
and territory governments. CCP is
a member of CAOs Contemporary
Arts Organisations of Australia.