Behind You: Three sculptuations by Gail Hastings
21/NOV/2025 to 20/DEC/2025
Curated by Narelle Desmond, Ry Haskings and Vincent Alessi
Conners Conners Gallery
Dir: Ry Haskings
Fitzroy Town Hall
201 Napier Street
Fitzroy VIC 3065
Australia
This project is supported through the Yarra City Council Quick Response Grants Program
photos: Christian Capurro
behind you: red, 2010
Acrylic and lead pencil on wood, watercolour and lead pencil on paper, acrylic frame
160cm high x 120cm wide x (‘x’ + 40)cm deep
behind you: blue, 2007
Acrylic and lead pencil on wood, enamel on steel, watercolour and lead pencil on paper, acrylic frame
185.5cm high x 163.5cm wide x (‘x’ + 70)cm deep
Cylindrical space lined by yellow, 2022-5
Acrylic on wood, watercolour and lead pencil on paper on wood
220cm high x 110cm wide x (‘x’ + 50)cm deep
photo: Christian Capurro
Essay
— 1 —
Mental space: Is it inside or outside
Gail Hastings
On a site plan of the original building that the Melbourne art gallery Buxton Contemporary replaced, I can pinpoint the exact spot I realised a fundamental component of my ongoing practice currently on show at Conners Conners Gallery. In 1989, the preexisting building on the corner of Dodd’s Street housed VCA’s sculpture department, where I was in my third and final year of a Bachelor of Arts degree. On the rickety timber-weathered walkway connecting adjacent studios, outside the tutorial room, three fellow sculpture students, perched on sun-bleached wood benches, were engrossed in the latest Art Forum magazine draped over their knees. Immersed in blissful rapture, I could see they had dissolved into the full-colour spreads of contemporary sculpture pictured there. However, suddenly, their vociferous swooning hit me as though I’d mistakenly walked into a brick wall. For these three students single-handedly maintained an anti-painting brigade that proclaimed sculpture primary and powerful for engaging real, three-dimensional, non-illusionistic space — against two-dimensional representations of space. The same three students who, during crit sessions in our studios, preferred to look out the window, at their watch, at their shoes, speechless, unable to focus on the sculpture physically in front. Yet, here they were, hearts palpitating at the very scent of newly minted magazine-ink, salivating over two-dimensional representations of sculpture — unperplexed.
— 2 —
What to do: accost the students for their hypocrisy? Or, does the scenario suggest a complexity in perception, inflicting and informing us all?
To recognise the complexity, it helps to compare the role of representation in Kantian philosophy with the image in Bergsonian philosophy.1
In brief, for Kant, we gain access to the world through representations our senses provide. These representations are internal to us. Our mental faculties treat them as knowable objects as opposed to unknowable objects, things in themselves, outside us. Two worlds thereby separate. A world of internal representations made intelligible through a priori knowledge — knowledge we have since birth. On the border of which is a world of unknowable objects outside us. At play, nevertheless, is the role representations have in our sense of self. For in the process of our senses receiving manifold qualities from outside that coalesce into a unified representation, unification can only occur through an I realising it is the same I that receives the otherwise disparate sensorial data. For Kant, ‘The I think must be able to accompany all my representations’.
Against the notion of two separate worlds, Bergsonian philosophy instead resorts to an image, not an internal representation. As such, it can be difficult to appreciate what Bergson means by an image if it is not an internal representation, as he keeps the term vague. Nevertheless, Bergson’s image occurs outside perception as well as within perception. The outside and inside become a shared medium within one world.
- Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Critique of Pure Reason, 1781; Henri Bergson (1859–1941), Matter and Memory, 1896.
— 3 —
If we consider just one sense alone — sight — we can more easily come to terms with Bergson’s image. For vision involves a process of light bouncing off objects and, depending on the chemical constitution of an object’s surface, or what we call its colour, the surface absorbs certain light frequencies while reflecting others. The resulting frequencies enter the eye and excite photoreceptor rods and cones constituting the retina at the back of the eye. The resulting electrical signal travels through the optic nerve to different parts of the brain for processing. Yet, there is no internal screen on which these separate processes coalesce as a unified image.
A Bergsonian image neither coalesces inside an eye nor inside a mind. Given the speed of light, the speed of successive electrical excitations travelling the optic nerve, and the speed of our brain’s various parts processing these signals, I instead suggest the screen on which this sensorial velocity coalesces is external to us in physical space. For the screen is the object itself at which we look. The object coordinates a brain’s signals through space to coalesce into a unified image.
In this hypothesis of vision, our sense of self is unified not in ourselves, as Kant would have it, but at that point of the world outside of us at which we stare. Our sense of self is therefore gained through a process outside ourselves. This philosophical notion is not new. What is new is appreciating how sight nevertheless requires physical space to coalesce into images. When before, this process was believed to occur internally and not external to us.
— 4 —
Why, then, were the three sculpture students instantly gratified by two-dimensional representations of sculpture instead of the dynamism of physical space?
In outlining the dynamic of a single instant in vision in which light bouncing off an object excites our retinas, multiply this by however many additional instances just a millimetre move to the left, right, up or down generates. The slightest shift releases a cascading multitude of light and perspectival changes that perpetually overlays previous sense data that we need to project back onto space to simply get around. If we were to become aware of how we continually read space every second of the day, we would derail our ability to think of anything else. Our spatial processing therefore slinks-off silently into the background, leaving us free to thrive through other pursuits. Yet, amidst this spatial slumber, we have somehow to awaken at least a part of our clandestine processing if we are thoughtfully to engage in spatial actuality. Looking at a three-dimensional artwork becomes therefore instantly hard work. Unless one finds a single point that casts an authoritative overview. A photographic representation of a three-dimensional work can give that concretising single point into which one can comfortably immerse oneself.
— 5 —
In light of which, how might we reconsider Daniel Buren’s 1979 essay, The Function of the Studio, in which he describes how the studio is the first limit of numerous frames — ‘picture frame, niche, pedestal, palace, church, gallery, museum, art history, economics, power, etc.’ — that separates a portable artwork from a world of meaning outside it.2 Yet, even though a frame distances an artwork from the world outside, it is nevertheless inside the studio that an artwork is closest to its reality.3 Wherein an artwork falls prey to a mortal paradox. For if it pursues its purpose to be seen in a museum or sold through a gallery, it has to leave its own reality, its origin, in the studio. Yet, if the artwork forfeits its purpose to remain in the studio, the artist instead risks the jeopardy of starvation.4 In other words, when an artwork is in its place of production, it remains private and cannot take place for a public. Whereas to take place for the public, it has first to leave its own place. Buren observed this contradiction after he visited numerous artists in their studios, in which he found a rich reality in the studio that contextualised the artwork and spoke the artwork’s truth. A truth denied, however, when Buren would visit the same artwork on public exhibition.5 For Buren, instead of proceeding from a private place of production, his artwork ‘proceeds from its extinction’.6
To this extent, Buren was among the first to short-circuit the ossifying frame of an artwork that limited its extent and terminated its process. He did so by giving public access to site-specific art in perpetual process within its place.
- Daniel Buren, The Function of the Studio, October, p. 51.
- Daniel Buren, p. 53.
- Daniel Buren, p. 53.
- Daniel Buren, p. 56.
- Daniel Buren, p. 58.
— 6 —
Yet let us suppose that the three students with which I commenced this essay could not tear their eyes from two-dimensional representations of Buren’s artwork, preferring representations of space to actual space. Does this defeat Buren’s efforts to ensure an artwork’s perpetual process — if its most likely place is framed by two-dimensions? On the one hand, I could say this is the bleak reality three-dimensional work cannot escape more than four decades later.
On the other hand, by recognising the importance of peripheral space in the coalescing dynamic of our visual field, we can more broadly recognise that an I becomes an I through a unifying other outside us. To be in the physical midst of that process can either be numbing if we prefer to let our spatial processing continue to sleep, or electrifying.
Either way, the one new and two older sculptuations comprising Behind You each engage a process of maintaining peripheral space to enrich its role in a sense of self.
With this, much appreciation goes to Peter Tyndall, whose contagious enthusiasm for art excited the curators to initiate a conversation with me that thankfully led to this exhibition.
Publisher: Connners Conners Gallery, Fitzroy Town Hall, 201 Napier Street, Fitzroy 3065
Date: 21 November 2025
© the author
