It’s Not Goodbye…

Works in paint and wood and painted wood by Andy Waddle

On exhibition at Among The Trees
September 2024

Artist’s Statement

September 2024

For those who don’t know, Among The Trees is a reclaimed timber shop and woodworking school in Marrickville, and I have been a tenant in their upstairs shared makerspace for a little over a year now. It has been a wonderful space to work on some Art of Diversion client projects. It has also allowed me to make some other artworks in my spare time, most of which are being shown publicly for the first time in this exhibition.

Working upstairs at Among The Trees on an Art of Diversion installation made out of thousands of used plastic bottle caps for Sydney’s Greenhouse Climate Tech Hub

Materials First

For the past few years, I have often wandered down laneways in Sydney’s Inner South and Inner West to see what hidden gems I might find. Despite some bewilderment at the staggering amount of perfectly usable items that people discard, I do get a strange sort of archaeological satisfaction out of inspecting the everyday urban detritus that a city produces. I’m always curious about the history of materials.

Given my passion for architecture, I have naturally gravitated towards construction and demolition waste on my material hunting excursions, but I have also come across more than a few stretched canvases, mostly used ones but even some blank ones in like-new condition. In fact, it was only because I found a canvas lying face-down in the road one day in my neighbourhood that I ever considered taking up painting in the first place.

Despite the best of intentions about not letting such fine specimens end up in landfill, at some point it became clear that I had, shall we say, a scavenging problem. I had started bringing home all kinds of found objects, and although I imagined many new uses for them, I really needed a proper work environment if I was ever going to breathe new life into anything that I had accumulated.

1-3: Scrap wood from shipping crates, pallets and old furniture found in local laneways, much of which I have repurposed into wood collage artworks. 4: A pile of hardwood from a neighbour’s demolition site that I loaded into a rented flatbed truck destined for Among The Trees. 5: The remains of a neighbour’s beautiful old oak tree that sadly got chopped down, shown stacked at Among The Trees thanks to some thoughtful tree removalists who took kindly to my suggestion that not all of their spoils should meet the wood chipper. 6: The former home of a local cocktail bar that relocated where I salvaged some recycled plastic panelling from the demolition. 7: A couple of used canvases that I pulled out of a bin in Marrickville.

Luckily, I discovered Among The Trees. Actually, to be precise, my partner discovered ATT and urged me to check it out. In hindsight, I realise now that at the time she was not-so-subtly encouraging me to relocate my fledgling practice to a suitable studio or makerspace as soon as possible (call it a ‘waste intervention’ intervention). She has been immensely supportive of me, but I think she also just wanted me and all of my new-found stuff out of our apartment. I’m glad she did.

Once I landed upstairs at ATT, I was not only better equipped to work on some larger client projects, but I was also able to embark in earnest on my own personal artistic journey, free to experiment and explore different mediums. I tried my hand at framing a few canvases using reclaimed timber (not as easy as I thought it would be, but I’m learning), and lately I have been creating some wooden sculptural assemblages, enough of them that I think I now have a small body of work worth sharing, hence this exhibition.

1: Manitou (Ode to Yvonne), 2023, 2: Detail, On/Off the Wagon (Extended Version), 2024, 3: Detail, Red White and Blue Residue, 2024 4: Detail, The Sea of Signals..., 2023

Experimentation and Improvisation

Although I don’t consciously adhere to any particular ‘style’, my work is rarely figurative, and I suppose it could best be described as some kind of abstract expressionism. My influences are varied, as is probably reflected in the exhibition. I love colour theory and enjoy playing with colours and forms and seeing how their interrelatedness can alter the emotional perception of a work.

My paintings tend to range from hard-edge geometric compositions to more densely expressive, graffiti-like works. Whereas the former results from quite controlled strokes and masking, the latter results from more unrestrained, allover mark making. Some works have an architectural, diagrammatic character (with lines and blocks of colour delineating some imaginary space), while some feature a distinctive mix of symbols and glyphs, some recognisable, some vaguely familiar (which seem non-spatial or perhaps floating in some conceptual space).

The more gestural paintings—the graphic symbol amalgamations, in particular—usually end up on the canvas via a semi-intentional process akin to doodling or asemic writing which is instinctive but far from mindless. That is, I try to paint them with some degree of purpose while remaining open to the accidental. Any discernible directionality in these works is usually by chance. They involve lots of improvisation and days or even weeks of layering until something emerges and the work begins to feel resolved. I always feel as though I could probably be a little more efficient with the paint, but I don’t consider this process inherently wasteful. Every brushstroke, splatter and patch of colour (even if it gets painted over never to be seen again), plays a role in building up to a finished work.

Regardless of the medium, my process is typically very intuitive and iterative. I often construct, deconstruct and reconstruct repeatedly, in most cases leaving and later returning to a work multiple times to see it in a different context, light or mood.

Where to Next?

I’ve titled this exhibition ‘It’s Not Goodbye...’ which is meant to serve as a reference both to the materials used in much of my work as well as to my creative journey—and the ongoing story of Art of Diversion—which will soon include a new chapter in Melbourne. Just as the journey continues in some way for materials that I find and repurpose, I might be leaving Sydney (for now), but this is not goodbye... It’s something else... to be continued.

Being a part of the shared makerspace upstairs at Among The Trees these past several months has had many perks, not least of which is obviously proximity to a reclaimed timber shop (i.e. access to a supply of interesting materials and to woodworking experts). Most of all, though, I have felt incredibly privileged to have been so welcomed by such a supportive community of creative people, including all the ATT staff and the other makers upstairs. This little corner of Marrickville is full of good energy thanks to a bunch of smart, fun, kind people who are generous with their time and happy to share their knowledge. Moving on will be bittersweet, for sure, but I move on truly inspired by what I have experienced here.

I want to thank Among The Trees for making me feel so at home here and for the opportunity to use the gallery to show some of my work.

Cheers,

Andy

Works included in this exhibition