Donna Marcus: Critical Mass Memory
Donna Marcus has been making art for more than four decades. Her striking sculptures created from discarded aluminium kitchenware have earned her a national and international reputation as a stellar practitioner. Marcus says that “one cannot simply recycle things without also re-using memories,” and it is in this continued desire to play with memory, history and the layering of culture that she prepares for her forthcoming exhibition at HOTA on the Gold Coast.
Image credit: Donna Marcus, SPINE, 2021, anodised aluminium, plastic and bakelite, 132 x 123 x 4 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, Sydney
What exhibitions have been pivotal moments in your practice?
The National Gallery of Australia’s National Sculpture Prize and Exhibition in 2001 gave me an extraordinary opportunity to make a ‘frieze’ on an 18-metre wall, to play with scale. Then Fathoming: Contemporary Australian Sculpture in 2002, a Gold Coast Art Gallery touring exhibition, provided space to create new works. The narrative I developed there flows through to the forthcoming show at HOTA, which will include GABO and hotpoint, both drawn from the sediment of the recycling skip, the things that were not good enough, or complete enough, to even make it to the op shop shelf.
hotpoint is made from left over plastic and Bakelite knobs prised from thousands of saucepan lids. Elevating the lowly with echoes of modernism and 20th century industrial design, small personal stories and their relationship to grander narratives is always a rich and compelling catalyst for work. This is reflected too in GABO, which refers directly to a family history of maritime salvage in Berrys Bay. GABO was the ship my mother lived on as a child during the Great Depression. It was salvaged by her family until the hull was towed beyond the heads and sunk. Performers from the Tivoli lived on an adjacent ship and came to the GABO to rehearse in the large lounge. This speaks to the larger history of Berrys Bay, which played a key place in Australian art history, referencing Roland Wakelin’s Back to Berry’s Bay (1916) and Percy Lindsay’s S.S. Gabo. Berry’s Bay, Sydney (c.1930). It’s exciting to have both ... Subscribe to read this article in full
