In Positive / Negative four shape-shifting artists engage and play with ideas of real and imagined place and positive and negative space. The works bring together a miscellany of images, shapes and forms, a slew of ambiguous and ambivalent spatial propositions and notions of absence and presence in a cryptic push-me-pull-you dialogue.

Artists share with mathematicians a curiosity about the physical world and both approach its description in speculative terms, exploring ‘the spaces between’ and a diversity of parallel realities.

Kevin Chin’s works, whether installation or painting, seek to re-make and integrate his histories and those of others; to reinterpret physical space to create fictive sites, memories and ideas of home. By rearranging and transposing the pattern and placement of objects, Kevin Chin transforms the identity of a ‘lost’ space to pose and challenge physical and psychological notions of home and belonging – of here and now, and of ‘far, far away’.

In Chin’s LIttle pieces series, images and fragments drawn from photographs of sites and incidents from personal travels are removed from their everyday context. Surreal juxtapositions, including a fox, a fruit wagon and a wishing well floating in the space of individual canvases conjure a sense of fantastical children’s stories yet defy narrative and conventional spatial propositions. The objects hover, suspended at random in an unidentified cosmos as in a dreamscape; like disparate clues for a ‘write your own’ plot.

Chloe Vallance also plays with levels of visibility and invisibility, of active and passive in works, that, like Chin’s, are developed in response to the experience of travel and as a way to document the significance of fleeting, passed or potential moments and memory.

The role of the individual in society and the relationship to place as seen through the figure and its various contextual situations is the focus of her work. For Vallance, the drawing of a passed moment can relay an unfixed reality, validate an experience, and allow her to feel closer to the people and places captured in that instant.
Raw plywood surfaces and the medium of colour pencil are chosen by the artist to signify both the particular and the general. The pencil marks imply focused moments and ‘out of focus’ actions are suggested in the areas of bare plywood. The blank, exposed and unfinished nature of the wood grain can become the illusion of another space or suggest an alternate reality. In contrast, the passages of coloured pencil implies specific intention in terms of ‘hands on’ purposeful mark making; following the grain; colouring in, fleshing out and filling in the gaps, documenting the ever-shifting saga of everyday life.

Greg Hodge investigates the junction between abstract painting and representational image. Through the placement and composition of interlocking shapes and motifs there is both a relationship and a tension between an imagined illusionistic space and a representational image. While the spaces and the forms that develop out of the painting process are invented, the repeated overlay and expansion and stacking of motifs relate to architecture and landscape. This building of forms and their positioning within a painted atmospheric space invite the viewer to seek a recognisable or tangible image within the work.

The artist’s preoccupation with light and surface developed from his continuing interest in the use of atmospheric rendering within the Western landscape tradition. The surfaces of Hodge’s paintings are constructed out of transparent and opaque layers with traces of the work’s history often revealing themselves around the edges. These areas act as a frame or a window device, becoming an important compositional element.

The shaped formats of board games underpin Vilma Bader’s assemblages in which painting and sculpture converge. Her Board Paintings are formalist, gridded, geometric, hard-edged constructed paintings made from myriad sawn and painted wood segments.  They are compressed, tight, ordered, obsessive, detailed and mathematically and technically precise. The works are vested in the rhythms, logic and aesthetics of geometry and the intrinsic beauty of systems and relate to the philosophy of art as play.