Greg Creek

Amendments comprises an ongoing series of large watercolour works on paper made up of numerous concentric coloured rings. From each ring paint drips and spills, ‘amending’ those rings it traverses as it gravitates down the paper’s surface – colour drips and spills from the edge of the page, staining the balsa wood tray beneath. Creek’s drawings take an extended period to complete. As the rings gradually accrue and colour harmonies develop, time and change accumulate. The materiality of the drawing and sense of performance is heightened by the play of gravity and drip trails. There is both a pure optical beauty and a strong material presence in these works. Part object, part process and part exercise in repetition, the works might also be read metaphorically: the titles, First Amendment, Second Amendment and so on suggest a political reference to the subtle alteration or decay of an ideal. In their serial formulation, titling and temporality Creek’s Amendments indicate an interest in minimalist and other 60s and 70s process driven drawing practices. For this series he revisits and expands upon the target motif used in previous drawing projects.

TEXT

‘Bodies Politic’ is a series of eight desktop drawings. A senior lecturer at RMIT University, Creek regularly takes art students to wet specimen laboratories for anatomical studies. Equally pragmatic and macabre, the labor laboratories showcase human body parts, enabling close study and research. The eight tables in Bodies Politics refer to the experience of these visits and the eight continents of the body as it is divided in classical anatomy. These are the head, neck, thorax, back, upper limb, abdomen, pelvis and lower limb. The anatomy laboratory lays out the dissected body for study onto eight tables representative of these ‘continents’. In addition to the observational training these visits provide, the experience of studying human remains also offers a sobering reminder of our ontological state and has naturally led Creek to consider his own corporeal self.

In this work Creek has inked his own body and made physical body prints on the paper, which forms a ground or landscape from which the drawing emerges. The prints are not always obvious as markings made with the artist’s body although the inference of skin, edges of limbs, hair is clearly visible. In this way Creek makes the inherently private, public and opens the body up to political actions, protestations, observation and defacement. There is a playful use of scale in the attachment of small ink-jet transfer prints of 20th century international political leaders, each related to one of the various ‘continents’ of the world. The play on geographic and bodily land masses, and the absurd scale of the little pinned on heads against their power-ranger-esque bodies is comic and also slightly abject, reminiscent of the political caricature of cartoonists such as James Gillray (1757-1815).
The eight tables sit in their space akin to geographic land masses, which the viewer can move between, connecting one drawing to the other. There are cross-references to read across the tables with parts of drawings having been removed and repasted into others. Synergies emerge with the markings of gestures and physical actions visible in rips, tears and losses. The remains of these attacks on the paper, tear at the body prints leaving us to wonder in Creek’s words “Who would do that to a body? But then whose body is it anyway?” - Kirsten Paisley

Violence of Appearances. Oil on canvas, each 122 x 122cm