GRACE WEAVER

Weaver explores the unique atmosphere elicited in hotel rooms asspaces which are both intimate and anonymous, timeless yet transitory.The controlled cast of figures participate in the specific script ofbehaviours conditioned by the limited provision of a hotel room: ahighly staged, utopic domestic environment. Reading, lounging, writing,washing and thinking, the characters are presented in various stages ofundress, capturing a sense of emotional liminality and fleeting in-betweenness.

Weaver’s practice investigates what she self-terms as the ‘poetry oftiny moments, the small increments that make up modern life’,transforming seemingly unremarkable settings into contemplativerealms, inviting reflection on the profound within the ordinary. Drawinginspiration from the eternal nature of staged effigies in Russian as wellas Byzantine religious iconography, Weaver’s figures are imbued with asimilar sense of sacred significance. Much like icons which served asconduits to the divine, the characters operate as emotional proxies,vessels through which modern experiences are projected, transcendingthe specificities of time and place.

Taking their compositional cues from Henri Matisse, the HotelPaintings play with line and form as Weaver reverses, tilts and warpstraditional notions of perspective. Furniture and objects are abstractedinto trapezoids and elongated triangles, in colour fields of cornflowerblue, deep red, golden yellow and bottle green, creating a sensation ofspatial envelopment. The figures themselves, fleshy sweeps of pink andtan, almost dissolve at times into the background’s taupe, beige andochre, emphasising the interplay between the figures and theirsurroundings.

This sense of constructed abstraction is particularly apparent inWeaver’s collages which were made during her extended trip, wherethe artist travelled through Marrakesh, Fes, Essaouira, Casablanca,Rabat and Tangier. Drawing pertinent visual references to the country’srich landscape, and with distinct citations to designs found in the YSLMuseum in Marrakesh, each collage depicts a simplified woman mid-stride, a prototypical tourist visiting Morocco. Made from objects foundin pharmacies,supermarkets and book shops, the collaged figures step throughcinema schedules, swinging Mentos bags, clothed in Tabasco dresses,Coca-Cola skirts and tropical fruit tops. Merging figurative, ornamentaland commercial elements, Weaver’s collages transform theenvironment of her Moroccan hotel rooms from painted settings tophysical places where art is made.