Potentially Symbolic Objects

"Potentially Symbolic Objects" was an exhibition first developed by and for the SACC, (Singleton Arts and Cultural Centre) NSW, Australia, featuring the series of plates below, some shown in earlier states.

This exhibition of domestic objects was the contemporary etching element appended to a larger exhibition titled Etching: Rembrandt’s Legacy displayed in the Main Gallery at the Singleton Arts + Cultural Centre (September 9 2023 - November 19 2023) . The exhibitions were also shown at the University of Newcastle Watt Space Gallery in Newcastle Australia. (19 January to 1 March 2024). As the following installation shots reveal, the copper plates that generated each print were also displayed in the exhibition.

The following views also give some indication of how the different venues allowed different dialogues between the contemporary etched objects and the use of symbolic objects in the historical etchings.

**Gallery 2, Watt Space, Newcastle, NSW (installation detail)**

Below are installation views of the first showing of Potentially Symbolic Objects in the SACC, Singleton, NSW.

New state gives much more volume to the tank with additional aquatint and burnishing of highlights (Copy)

Greater sense of volume also added with aquatint in this new state (Copy)

The subject of each of these plates is what can be described as a domestic object, that in the first instance, has personal significance and therefore will be familiar to anyone in the western world who lived through the nineteen sixties and seventies. For such an audience, mutual nostalgia and memories are therefore embedded in most of these images but the ambition here is to prompt the bigger contemporary question as to what degree human emotional life gravitates around objects. These prints in the SACC show are a distance from traditional still-life images, since they give focus to one object as singular point of interest, using the compositional mode of the prolific selfie but not the means. Each image is drawn to dominate the frame of the plate by constructional manipulation of a central viewing point as with classic Renaissance perspective rules rather than the 360 degree or fish-eye warping associated with a camera lense. The accompanying exhibition Etching: Rembrandt’s Legacy features a number of etchings from the past where the symbolic potential for objects was exploited in representing, the Elements, Human Senses, Hours of the Day, Occupations and so on. To create a direct dialogue with these works, examples of etchings by Piranesi and Lepautre are included in the same space of the Potentially Symbolic Objects installation. These works depict fanciful or fantastic objects created by these artists in the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries respectively.

The Watt Space layout allowed the contemporary domestic objects to be visually linked with the historical etchings across two discrete gallery spaces Gallery 2 and 3 where the connecting wall acting as a physical visual transition as shown in the following shots of the linking wall, Gallery 3, and Gallery 2 respectively

Junction wall between Gallery 3 and Gallery 2, Watt Space, Newcastle

Singleton Arts and Cultural Centre Layout of Potentially Symbolic Objects

showing the visual linkages between the historical and contemporary etching.

The linkage to the selection of etchings in the hallway gallery; which depict the hours of the day, elements etc., is made with a green printed version of the Weight of Prawns etching, as shown below along with views of this corridor gallery.

Etching: Rembrandt’s Legacy