Penny Coss

My work is a response to the natural world, its geology, biology and botany, with oblique references to landscape systems in extremis like earthquakes, bushfires and algal bloom . These natural and manmade disasters link layered landscapes with latent histories and are often directly the subject of my work.

I work intuitively, seeking the unexpected of making through alchemic processes . Utilising the forces of gravity, objects are recycled in the studio, leaning one on top or over another. They are held, bound, touching and resting. Individual parts are arranged adjacent to, on, over or apart from each other indicating iterative possibilities in creating a whole. Geological phenomena are revealed through layered saturations of poured colour, often stained, parts inform parts, woven under and over, revealing marks and accidents through resists and tears in the fabric , creases, folds and other irregularities.

My processes take in imagined and real phenomena from encounters walking the landscape and spans sculpture , installation and painting. Empirical mapping of boundaries and terrains in the natural world have informed my recent work. The act of walking paths 'legally' or 'illegally' traversing the topology of the landscape reference the Deleuzian idea of the metaphor of the fold, where all of the universe is in the process of folding and unfolding histories and knowledge.

© Penny Coss