Scrumptious is a selection of works created over the past 4 years that present a playful offering of illusory puzzle-solving.
I am interested in spatial sentience – in embodied knowledge of our familiar environments and how we navigate through time and space. To consider how we perceive, understand and experience space as a shared family trait, passed down through a lineage of artists, designers and woodworkers. My works celebrate these crafts, embracing traditional building design and construction methods with an abstraction art practice.
My candy-coloured paintings invite a perceptual dance between object and audience as iterative patterned forms fold, collapse and expand across spatial planes. The physicality and materiality of the 3D paintings present themselves as static objects and, like Willys de Castro’s Active Objects, engage the perambulatory viewer to consider multiple perspectives in order to fully experience the work.
The surfaces of the hand-built forms are finished with mis-tint acrylic house paint sourced from local paint suppliers, and hand-me-down tins from friends and family. I am fascinated by their stories, and how they speak to the vernacular of location. In delicious colours, some of the most recent I have used are called Mint Pea, Coconut Ice, and Scrumptious.
Petalia Humphreys lives and works on Gubbi Gubbi land on the Sunshine Coast and is Founder/Director of Studio 26.
