NANOPLASTICA

Erica Seccombe

24th May- 5th July 2008 | CCAS Gorman

Science and irony might seem like strange bed fellows - as science and art may once have been. Just as science benefits from imagination, however, so art benefits from experimentation and thus Erica Seccombe's Nanoplastica is a match made in heaven. The story begins with a residency at the ANU Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering when Dr Tim Senden x-rayed a variety of miniature plastic models from the artist's collection on the Microcomputed Tomograph (XTC).

In modern and post-modern times the "art of the everyday" has made frequent attempts to raise objects of humble origins way above their station and into the heady heights of the masterpiece. Even so, there is something particularly "sad" about Seccombe's tiny plastic toys, representing as they do, a point at which consumerism and futility meet. "Free gifts" to be found in confectionary these objects are inaccurate representations of fauna that offer nothing to humanity other than the slightest distraction. Using scientific equipment that is rarely accessible to art-ists, however, Seccombe effects an extraordinary transformation in which her work becomes "a metaphor for contemporary scientific techniques and processes such as nanotechnology to examine issues of visualization, replication and simulation of the natural world”. (David Broker, 2008)

Image: Erica Seccombe, Nanoplastica, 2007, video still