Art meets fashion in ‘Sculpting the Senses’

Mon 26 Aug 2024

One of the most rewarding aspects of translating ‘Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses’ for a Brisbane context and audience was the opportunity to bring van Herpen’s extraordinary designs into conversation with artworks from the QAGOMA collection. These staged pairings enabled us to expand upon the original curatorial premise of the Paris exhibition, opening up new dialogues and thematic connections, while also imbuing the exhibition with a unique resonance for Australian visitors. It felt faithful to the spirit of van Herpen’s expanded view of fashion, in which she connects the practice organically with many other fields of enquiry, and at the same time, offered us some curatorial scope to re-imagine the exhibition in ways that were both site-specific and meaningful for Brisbane.

Guided by the nine chapters of the exhibition, we compiled a shortlist of artworks that we thought shared visual, formal, conceptual or thematic synergies with van Herpen’s work. We had conversations over many months about artists with whom van Herpen shared a natural affinity, or took inspiration from — some she knew personally or had collaborated with previously, others were a new discovery. Their inclusion in the exhibition speaks to her openness and responsiveness to new ideas and ways of looking at the world, her innate curiosity and her essentially collaborative approach to her work.

Let us introduce you to our Collection artworks in ‘Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses’ at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) until 7 October 2024, and also highlight some of the contemporary works on loan that you will only see during the exhibition.

QAGOMA Collection

Dale Chihuly

Inspired by his experience exploring underwater worlds, Dale Chihuly’s glass form Seaform Macchia group #85.84.7 (illustrated) echoes the unfurling form of a clam. The Italian term ‘macchia’ of the title refers to densely growing flora, and is adopted by the artist to describe the fine undulations typical of the molluscs, corals and other marine invertebrates that he conjures in seven pieces of glass.

The semi-translucent beauty of this sculpture resonates with the qualities of the ocean, where light is captured, refracted and transmitted endlessly, responding to the infinitely variable climatic conditions of the marine environment. In this respect, it shares synergies with van Herpen’s marine-inspired designs: the Mano-Maya dress, from the ‘Meta Morphism’ collection 2022 and Sensory Seas dress, from the ‘Sensory Seas’ collection 2020 (illustrated).

Anne Noble

Essential to the life cycle of flowers and the agricultural systems that sustain human life, the humble bee is at once mighty and fragile. Anne Noble’s Dead Bee Portraits (illustrated) use microscopic photography to create ghostly images of deceased bees, in which even the finest hair on the insect’s body is delineated. To be visible to the electronic beam, the bees were dusted in gold, revealing battered wings and antennae under the enormous magnification. Van Herpen is similarly captivated by the microscopic details of nature’s design and she frequently draws inspiration from them in her biomimetic garments.

Cai Guo-Qiang

Cai Guo-Qiang’s Explosion Process Drawing for Dragon or Rainbow Serpent: A Myth Glorified or Feared: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 28 (Illustrated) is made from detonating gunpowder on paper in ways that leave a residue of scorch marks. Having worked with the forces of gravity and magnetism in some of her designs, van Herpen shares Cai’s commitment to experimenting with unpredictable media, appreciating that the universe holds the forces of creation and destruction in a constant state of flux.

Inspired by commonalities between the stories of the Rainbow Serpent from the Dreamtime and the mythology of the Chinese Dragon, the drawing recalls the calligraphic form of traditional Chinese ink painting, which delicately balances the contradictory tensions of control and spontaneity.

Sopheap Pich

Sopheap Pich’s Buddha (illustrated) hovers between figuration and abstraction. It is difficult to discern if this ghostlike figure is coming into existence or unravelling in a suspended state of entropy. Meticulously crafted from rattan and bamboo, Pich’s Buddha combines traditional weaving techniques with the visual language of contemporary sculpture. In marrying the old with the new, and the past with the present, it finds parallels with van Herpen’s approach which brings age-old artisanal craftsmanship together with a distinctly futuristic aesthetic.

Yayoi Kusama

Taking inspiration from rippling waves viewed from above while on a flight from Tokyo to Seattle, Yayoi Kusama began her ‘Infinity nets’ series in the late 1950s, this example Infinity nets (illustrated) is from later in her career.

Kusama’s Infinity nets painting comprises tiny crescent shapes repeated in ever-expanding arches on a white monochromatic ground. The undulating surface conveys the sensation of the hallucinations — perceived as a veil of dots — that the artist has experienced since she was a child. Van Herpen has long been interested in how neurological conditions affect our perception of the world, often playing with optical illusions and distortions of form in her work.

Kohei Nawa

Kohei Nawa’s works fuse the natural and virtual realms through exquisite studies in form and perception. In PixCell-Double Deer #4 (illustrated), two taxidermied deer in identical poses have been sliced together to produce an optical doubling, which the artist likens to the effect produced when holding ‘Ctrl+C’ on a keyboard. The outer surface of transparent beads approximates the thousands of pixels that make up digital images, as Nawa attempts to recreate the visual experience of the computer screen in sculptural form.

The beaded silhouettes of the deer become unstable and dynamic as the viewer moves around the sculpture, suggesting a disjunction between visual perception and bodily experience in the internet age. Nawa’s work was known to van Herpen, who admired the Japanese artist’s almost dreamlike explorations into the elasticity of perception.

Doris Platt

In the 1970s, Doris Platt and her husband were cattle-musterers at Marina Plains cattle station, south of Coen in Cape York Peninsula, where goannas were found in abundance. Goanna skin (illustrated), which is based on Indigenous sand-drawings, builds around striated bands that swell and contract like the contours of the landscape.

The painting depicts the discarded skin of a goanna, its texture and patterning explored through rhythmic, free-flowing white and cream lines, which move abstractly across the canvas. Despite coming from a very different cultural context, the painting shares immediate visual correspondences with van Herpen’s striking Syntopia dress 2018 (illustrated), whose translucent black silk organza form captures the successive phases of a bird in flight.

Gunybi Ganambarr

Like van Herpen, Yolgnu artist Gunybi Ganambarr is known for his radical experimentation and innovative approach to materials. In addition to using the traditional bark and ochres of his artistic heritage, the artist often looks to more modern or industrial materials found on Country to make his work.

In Nganmarra (illustrated), Ganambarr etches patterns into a disused galvanised iron water tank. The metalwork carries the design of the reservoirs of the Ngaymil/Datiwuy clans that are found between the Gurrumuru and Cato Rivers, running into Arnhem Bay, in the Northern Territory. This area is home to a watercourse that combines salt water and fresh water, meaning it is regarded as an area of fertility for the Ngaymil people. It is also a point from which souls are delivered to and from the Earthly and spiritual worlds. Within this lagoon, swim djanda (sacred goannas), their movements creating patterns on the water’s surface.

Exhibition loans

Megan Cope

Quandamooka artist Megan Cope makes reference to the ancestral middens that were built from the accumulated shell waste of Australia’s First Nations people over thousands of years. Whispers Wall (illustrated) is a rich hanging tapestry, it suggests a monumental underwater architecture that has been transplanted to the Gallery from the ocean. Now standing on Kurilpa Point — a traditional meeting place for the local Aboriginal people — the work connects shared narratives and kinships to the saltwater world.

David Spriggs

Origins (illustrated) by Canadian artist David Spriggs makes use of optical illusion, conveying the sensation of solidity and depth through the layering of multiple sheets of PET film and acrylic plexiglas. Each of the three sculptures reveals a different representation of human life, rendered with a vaporous and ghost-like quality. The first is a vortex suggesting the origin of all creation; the second represents Hera, the Greek goddess of the life of women and the protector of women in childbirth; while the third is the double helix structure of DNA genetic code.

Spriggs shares with van Herpen an interest in the origins of matter and the process of becoming. Both artists are drawn to the worlds of art and science because of how they wrestle with ideas of what exists at the outer limits of our senses and understanding — in other words, the unknown.

mé

Created by the Japanese artist group 目 — pronounced ‘mé’ and meaning ‘eye’ — the ‘seascape’ Contact (illustrated) evokes the menacing swell of a tumultuous ocean. Dappled light caresses the waves, so they appear to ripple and shift before our eyes. According to the artists, the work provokes ‘awareness of the inherent unreliability and uncertainty in the world around us’. This hyperreal work illustrates van Herpen’s deep affinity for water and the ocean — and when designing collections, her inclination to play with human perception.

Rogan Brown

Like van Herpen, Rogan Brown is inspired by scientific images and direct observations of nature, using the centuries-old technique of papercutting to ‘sculpt’ organic forms from paper and card. The infinitely small is brought into focus in the exquisite precision of his pieces Ghost Coral Variation, Ceres, Chimera, and Magic Circle Variation, (illustrated) which seek to convey the intricate complexity and diversity of the living world. Combining art and science, Brown’s pieces open us up to the invisible worlds that surround us. He chooses to work with paper as it ‘embodies the paradoxical qualities that we see in nature: its fragility and durability, its strength and delicacy’.

Brown’s collaborations with van Herpen — including the Magnetosphere dress (illustrated), from the ‘Earthrise’ collection 2021 — involve the translation of papercuts evoking the invisible world of cells, bacteria and viruses, as viewed under a microscope, into incredibly complex and otherworldly garments.

Courtney Mattison

Courtney Mattison’s practice involves translating the effects of climate change on the fragile beauty of coral reefs through the creation of sculptural installations of stoneware and porcelain. The ceramic wall relief Malum Geminos depicts bleached coral forms branching horizontally in a reflected pattern across the wall.

Mattison’s installation can be seen in the exhibition theme ‘Skeletal embodiment’, the works by van Herpen in this room reveal our insides on the outside. Encasing the figure like an exoskeleton, the iconic Skeleton 2011 dress (illustrated) — resembling bones or hard cartilage — occupies a space halfway between fashion and sculpture.

Heishiro Ishino

Japanese artist Heishiro Ishino creates sculptures that depict mystical figures and imaginary creatures drawing on myths and dreams, monsters and gods. Made from clay, his skeletal works appear to be both fluid and rigid, familiar and otherworldly — in most, seemingly familiar forms are obscured by myriad ornamental vertebrae, ribs, phalanxes and fibulas.

In Yomotsuōkami (illustrated), the artist explores the notion of the ‘astral body’ as a way of transcending classical representations of the human form. The resulting sculpture resembles a humanoid skeleton with a decorative skull ‘helmet’ and filigreed bone ‘wings’, complete with scroll- and arabesque-like adornments.

Ferruccio Laviani

The exquisite craftsmanship of the cabinet Gothik-A Cabinet (illustrated) by Italian designer Ferruccio Laviani is an homage to European medieval architecture, and can be read in dialogue with Iris van Herpen’s Cathedral dress (illustrated), on display nearby. Recalling the awe-inspiring architecture of the Duomo di Milano in Italy, or Westminster Abbey in London, Laviani’s cabinet comprises an artful cobweb of oak partially enveloping a transparent glass sideboard. The ornamentation and transparency recall the light-filled, soaring interiors of Gothic churches with their pointed arches and rib vaults, together with their rose windows, which were often rendered in stained-glass, such as those of the famous Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris.

The Cathedral dress recalls the magnificent Gothic cathedrals of northern Europe, whose medieval aesthetic is characterised by pointed arches, exterior flying buttresses, ribbed vaults, spires and light-filled, cavernous interiors. A fusion of fashion, sculpture and architecture, and designed using digital modelling, the subtle glow of the waxed-wood effect has been achieved by submerging the 3D-printed polyamide garment into a copper electroplating bath.

Janaina Mello Landini

São Paulo–based Brazilian artist Janaina Mello Landini works with fibre to create sculptures and installations inspired by complex computer systems, interconnected tree branches and roots, and networks of nerves or blood vessels (arteries, veins and capillaries). Resembling the labyrinthine architecture of an internal organ, the reflected pattern of threads in Ciclotrama 310 (illustrated) recalls a pair of lungs or kidneys, or a bisected liver. The artist’s fractal-like Ciclotrama works are named after a term she coined that combines the root word ‘cycle’ with the Latin word trama, meaning warp, weaving or cobweb. These woven cartographic artworks reference the Tree of Life, together with the notion that all our lives are interconnected in some way, as she explains: ‘our individual networks . . . show the infinite interconnectedness of personal trajectories throughout a system, society, and the world as a whole’.

Enrico Ferrarini

Italian artist Enrico Ferrarini is fascinated by neuroscience and explores the nature and processes of human perception in his work, including the question of how we experience time. At first glance, his ceramic plaster sculptures can be unnerving in their crooked and twisted distortions of the human figure. He deliberately upends the conventions of portraiture and in R-Evoluzione (illustrated), a male figure appears to slowly claw his own face as he turns, a motion which elongates his physiognomy, arresting his facial features at a moment of heightened distress. Departing from the single-point perspective common to many classical busts, Ferrarini’s work instead fluidly dissolves and captures multiple viewpoints on the human form simultaneously. When viewed from different angles, this troubling portrait interrogates notions of perception, illusion and incarnation.

Ferruccio Laviani

Designed for Italian furnishing company Fratelli Boffi by Ferruccio Laviani, the Good Vibrations Cabinet (illustrated) is a striking piece of furniture that appears to glitch and catch before our eyes — like a distorted digital photograph or an image caught in the static of an old television. The Fratelli Boffi company is renowned for producing classically inspired furniture, and this storage cabinet recalls bygone eras, even though it has been made using contemporary digital processes.

Playing with the vagaries of human perception, Laviani’s cabinet is disorienting in that it physically manifests a solid form that has been bumped, jolted or vibrated by a tremor or quake. In capturing this precise moment of instability, this innovative work questions the principles of classical design — purity, cleanness and symmetry; however, it also evokes a comforting sense of deja vu in the familiarity evoked by its traditional features, form and fine craftsmanship.

Lanny Bergner

Based in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, Lanny Bergner creates handworked organic and geometric sculptures, basketry and installations from industrial materials, predominantly metal mesh, which are inspired by forms and structures in nature. These five sculptures (illustrated) resemble eggs, cocoons or pods containing living organisms or hybrid life forms that originate from an imaginary realm in which the organic and the artificial blend into one another.

Kim Keever

Kim Keever’s practice can be considered an expanded form of painting. As a former engineer for the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), his large-scale atmospheric photographs of puffs of pigment echo those captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (illustrated). To create these evocative and contemplative photographs, Keever pours combinations of paints into a 750-litre fish tank full of water. Using a large-format digital camera and carefully constructed lighting conditions in his studio, Keever then captures the resulting eddies, swirls and surges of colour, revealing chromatic clouds that recall the cosmos (illustrated).

Van Herpen collaborated with Keever on the ‘Shift Souls’ collection 2019, in which these atmospheric images of vibrant pigment were printed on billowing lengths of organza and tulle. The result of this collaboration was the Cosmica gown (illustrated) worn by actor Gwendoline Christie at the season 8 premiere for Game of Thrones in 2019. On Christie the pattern of golden bursts took on the illusion of smoke and fire, central to the plot of the fantasy series.

Haruka Kojin

This prismatic work Contact Lens (illustrated) by Japanese artist Haruka Kojin is imagined as an intermediary space in which a new sense of perception is influenced through subtle optical illusions. It comprises a complex array of acrylic lenses of varying sizes, behind which van Herpen’s levitating figures can be glimpsed. Exploring reflections, refractions, distortions, as well as double and troubled vision, the installation suggests a threshold onto multiple dimensions, encouraging visitors to embrace new ways of seeing and perceiving the world. The artist’s inspiration for the work came from considering alternate experiences of reality.

Watch | Journey through ‘Sculpting the Senses’

Watch | Iris van Herpen in conversation

Nina Miall is Curator, International Art, QAGOMA

‘Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses’ / Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) Brisbane / 29 June to 7 October 2024, across the ground floor in The Fairfax Gallery (1.1), Gallery 1.2, and the Eric and Marion Taylor Gallery (1.3).

The exhibition is co-organised by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris and QAGOMA, Brisbane, based on an original exhibition designed by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris.