Nest Time

The Sunday Painter is pleased to announce the opening of Emily Kraus’ solo exhibition 'Nest Time'. The exhibition is Kraus’ first solo show at the gallery and presents an ambitious new body of work that further develops her Stochastic series.

Kraus works inside a metal cubic structure around which she stretches a raw canvas loop with no end, allowing for space to move around her body, rather than the other way around. She first invented the apparatus to reconfigure the spatial constraints of her assigned eight-by-eight foot studio at London’s Royal College of Art, but has since recognised how its restrictions have served as the starting point for an entirely new approach to her practice. The mechanism itself – and the canvas loop which she manually rotates around the frame – can be interpreted as a metaphor for the cyclical world. Her method is characterised by a continuous oscillation between periods of impromptu, active mark-making and moments of meditative rumination. The resulting paintings are aptly termed Stochastic, meaning that they are formed of seemingly random probability distributions that can be played upon, but ultimately yield unpredictable results.

Informed by her extensive background in meditative, yogic and somatic practices, Kraus’ process is distinctly contemplative and reflective in nature. To create an organic image within a rigid system requires listening, attention and choreography of movement. The works included in Nest Time, then, reflect a continuous and cyclical universe, shaped by our ability to construct our lives amidst the tangible and often constrained realities of our existence. The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive essay by Alan Dorin, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University, whose extensive research examines stochastic processes in the realm of art and creativity.