The Secret, presents the figure of an abstracted female form, reclined in a state of repose. This space offered by the curved edges of its forms, is at once a place of refuge and site of potential activation. The Secret builds on my long-term engagement with female representation in the Western art historical canon, specifically modernism. More personally, the work is also informed by my own physical transformation through motherhood - where a body becomes a space of shared utility, beauty and discovery in response to the needs of a child.
Experimenting with notions of monumentality, permanence and precision, and based in my Australia Research Council funded investigation into art, play and risk(*), this design fashions abstracted bodily forms such as these to advocate for playable sculpture in the public sphere. Sculpture that invites opportunities for self-directed engagement and interaction, as well as open-ended play for children is of particular interest to me.
Intergenerationally geared, audiences of all ages find in this work opportunities to not only develop their imaginations, but also to develop their capacity for risk-management and resilience
The title of the sculpture weaves together two ideas intrinsic to the site: the contemporary library - as a place of learning and discovery, and the historical significance of the site - a boronggook, a fecund grassy turf - which became a place of gathering and connection.
Both the historical and contemporary use of the site holds untold stories that are to be shared and secrets that are to be imagined.
When I was a young child, each day after school from 3-5pm, I had wait for my mum to finish work. I would spend these hours in the local library (Glenfield Library, Auckland, New Zealand). At least 1000 hours of my youth were spent in that library - I knew it inside out and back to front. I lost myself and found myself in between the covers of the hundreds (thousands?) of books I would meander through. I never got tired of it because every day there would be new things to discover, and I always felt inspired and mystified by the things I found. This accumulated experience left an indelible love of libraries.
The library - as a place - is quiet, considered, thoughtful, curious, intelligent, private – it holds secrets, truths and fictions that shape the young mind. The link between what sits on the page and what is gleaned in the mind of the reader is intimate and yet tenuous – we can only ever imagine what the author is intending to convey. A book read by ten people will be experienced and remembered in ten different ways. We may all share the book, but our experience of the words is unique: enigmatic and private.
In the same way, this artwork is intended to be a place where people create their own stories and build their own histories. It’s a sculpture that can be played across, crawled through, sat upon. Its use is completely open-ended. People can imagine themselves into the forms and create their own experiences with it - experiences that will create memories that are unique, personal, enigmatic.
(*) As part of my academic fellowship with the Australian Research Council, I research the intrinsic value of playable public art in Australia, and the - often misunderstood - role of Australia’s play safety standards, which sometimes unnecessarily results in prohibiting the development of playable sculptures. (ART, PLAY, RISK: An interdisciplinary approach to child-friendly cities.
Born in the Netherlands 1979, Mestrom moved to New Zealand in 1983, and now lives and works in New South Wales.
Sanné Mestrom’s practice draws on 20th century iconic modernist works to explore the psychological, emotional and cultural significance of such art historical legacies. She explores how value is accorded to these objects, how they are always tied to their cultural and art historical contexts and how they may be-come substitutes for particular values or beliefs. Through replication, appropriation and disruption, her work filters historical mythologies through her own systems of reference, questioning notions of lineage, originality and influence, further altered through her experience of ‘making’.
In Mestrom’s works, minimal and abstracted forms are the building blocks of dynamic relationships of figure (body) and space (landscape). She engages a wide range of disciplines and endeavours including public art and play, architecture and natural phenomena governing our daily lives. While Mestrom’s works are highly compelling visually, with their curvilinear language, they are completed by their communication with surrounding architecture and landscape creating conversations of monumentality, permanance, and precision. Similarly, they require the day-to-day lived experience and presence of the viewer, communicating with body, perception, assumption and meaning as well as the more intimate engagement of touch.
For Mestrom, her works are always expressive of the body; from the span of her limbs and their range of movements, to the marks she makes in expressive preparatory drawings. She is also driven by an under-standing of art’s role as a conduit for embodiment and locator of place, of how art can bridge the built and natural environments. Sculptural surfaces provide places of refuge, rest and potential for movement and action to be fully embraced by both artist and audience alike.