2013 Breenspace Sydney
Joyce Hinterding’s exhibition, Simple Forces, considers the aesthetics of our electromagnetic environment through a series of conductive graphite drawings and installations. Hinterding approaches energy as a ‘non-human mode of expression’ that explores the four fundamental forces at the heart of existence: gravity, the strong force, the weak force and electromagnetism.
What happens when an artist translates invisible forces into compositions? Hinterding’s work finds a compelling balance between physics and aesthetics, a practice immersed in the strange territory between a field and the force it can generate. For Hinterding, a graphite spiral becomes a resonating structure that emanates energy, scavenging, storing and – when amplified – making audible and ‘playable’ the atmospheric forces in the room. The geometric forms are taken from algorithmic structures from the parallel worlds of nature and science. Symbols – a feature of art from its very beginnings – also carry the hidden agency of a functioning circuit, with the ability to relay ‘extra-territorial forces’ or to ‘sing the space’. Far from poetic fiction, these works function: constantly energised with the electromagnetic, the circuits are active and flowing.
Hinterding’s work articulates and responds to aesthetics, philosophy and deep science – transforming matter into ideas, and ideas into matter – a transcendence between the mind and the body, the material and the immaterial; the abstract and its application. Her distillation of ideas, coupled with aesthetically arousing forms, generates a heightened awareness of our surroundings.