About Gail Hastings

GAIL HASTINGS is an artist whose practice is situated at the rigorous intersection of sculpture, thought, and spatial logic. For over three decades, her work has challenged the traditional hierarchies of the art object, shifting focus from the heroic material to the metrical reality of space itself.

Drawing on the Hegelian movement of thought, Hastings approaches the studio as an investigative bureau for the logic of contradiction. Her work rejects the notion of space as a passive void and instead treats it as a concrete determinant. Through her sculptural situations, she creates a distinction between the functional, everyday space we ignore and a tridimensional sculptural space that achieves aesthetic attention when its form is treated as its content.

Based in Australia, Hastings continues to explore how the mediation of language and material can reclaim the enchantment of the invisible, transforming the act of seeing into an active process of everyday being.

Floor plan: Empty, except, first exhibited at Gertrude Contemporary (then 200 Gertrude Street, Melbourne) in 1990 then re-exhibited in the inaugural Primavera exhibition at the MCA in 1992.

Detail of one of five panels in flower power 1960s/1990s, 1993, its acquisition began the MCA’s Primavera collection.

Thought pronounces physical space in a sculptural situation. The architecture of that relationship has been the basis of my sculpture-based practice since graduating from art college in Melbourne at the end of 1988. In the polaroid above taken in Düsseldorf in 1995, I’m sitting on the floor, knackered, having worked three days and two nights without sleep to set up my work. That’s after building the work’s components, by hand. The painter Ingrid Weber and gallerist Thomas Taubert are trying to squeeze themselves out of view. The image, nevertheless, is of To make a work of thoughtful art, 1995, in which the process of a single thought exhausts the entire space of a room in four stages. The fifth completes the work when a laser-by first encounters it.

Polaroid taken in Düsseldorf of To make a work of thoughtful art taken on the night before the exhibition opened on 14 October 1995.

  1. From the square above cut out a thought into a shape and lean it next to number 1.
  2. From this thought cut out its anger and place it on the plinth at number 2.
  3. From this anger cut out its love and place it at number 3.
  4. From this love cut out its understanding and return it to where the thought had first been taken, at number 4.
  5. Now ask a passer-by the time [21:57] and the date [Freitag.13.10].

Sculptural Situations

THOUGHT pronounces physical space in a sculptural situation. Thought’s movement in this manner forms the foundation of my practice. I have adhered to this since graduating from art college in Melbourne at the end of 1988.

In the polaroid taken in Düsseldorf in 1995, I’m sitting on the floor. I had to work three days and two nights without sleep to set up the photographed work in time. That’s after building the work’s components, by hand. The painter Ingrid Weber and gallerist Thomas Taubert are trying to squeeze themselves out of view.

The sculptuation, itself, takes form through a single thought’s exhaustion of a room’s space in four stages.

The fifth stage completes the atwork when a passer-by writes the date and time onto the work itself. The act of dating the artwork’s initiation into public view challenges the more traditional authorisation of an artwork as belonging to the artist.

Gail Hastings, 2025

Gail Hastings