Artist: Jamie North
Artwork Name: Succession
Medium: cement, steel, steel slag, coal ash, oyster shell, organic matter
Date Created: 2016
Jamie North’s cast-concrete sculptures partner the natural and the industrial in a poetic relationship. Untamed native Australian plant species find their way through the landscape of inorganic elements, conjuring a kind of post-apocalyptic hope: nature triumphs among the ruin-like remnants of manmade structures. Equally monumental and fragile, melancholic and joyful, North’s works are immediately compelling.
Succession was created for the 20th Biennale of Sydney: The Future is Already Here - It's Just Not Evenly Distributed in 2016 and acquired by donation in 2017.
The work of Jamie North operates at the intersection of the natural and the human-made. In his cast concrete sculptures, native Australian plant species are employed to seek out natural growth lines and explore the landscape of the work. In time, the selected plants become entangled with the inorganic concrete, creating a continuously evolving and living sculptural form.
There is a fascinating merger of dichotomies at play within North’s sculptures; between the unpredictability of their lush inner crevices and their obdurate exterior shells. The work simultaneously invokes ideas of progress and collapse, industry and ruin, melancholy and triumph. The use of industrial materials further blurs the disjunction between the naturally occurring and the anthropogenic. The jagged edges of North’s poetically eroded forms expose a variety of aggregates such as coal ash and steel slag, which despite having the appearance of volcanic rock, are by-products of industry. This redemptive re-use of the waste generated by human activity sits alongside that most definitive of regenerative processes: the succession of nature.
Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gift. Program in memory of Kerry North, 2017. Courtesy the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney