Shadow Weave opens

Jacqueline Spedding, Hope Chest, 2014. Wood, ceramic, found objects, natural materials and digital projection. Carpentry by Georgina Donivan. Copyright of the artist.

Well it was a long week out at Dubbo installing my two works as part of a group show, Shadow Weave, with three other Blue Mountains artists and I have to say that this was one of the most enjoyable installs I've been involved with.

For this exhibition I've made two new works - Hope Chest and In the Shadow of a Dream. Both use found objects (drawers and an old haberdashery cabinet), along with natural materials, digital projection and ceramic objects. Both build on ideas explored in earlier works concerned with archiving and the process of memory.

For Hope Chest I worked with Georgina Donovan to build the cabinet for a set of mismatched drawers I found on the side of the road during the year. The structure was originally imagined as a simple white gallery wall but when it was complete I was confronted with an important element of the work - something I wasn't entirely expecting though why that would be I'm not sure! Seeing the texture of the wood sparked a whole range of ideas and I'm pleased with how it came together. One of the most enjoyable aspects of making for me is allowing the space for things to emerge as you work rather than realising a fixed idea.

The other challenge with this work was realising an idea I have had for a long time of a short video of moths fluttering around a light projected inside one of the drawers that would pause when viewers approached or opened the drawer and restart when they moved away. During installation I was struck by how well the projection worked on the underside of the top protruding drawer and so the last piece fell into place. A video of a moth fluttering around a light in slow motion, is projected onto the cabinet. Some drawers don't open at all, others are jammed - the contents are open for exploration and I do hope the audience enjoys interacting with this work.

The exhibition looks great and we are all grateful to the curators, Kent Buchanan and Caroline Edwards for their support and encouragement. The Western Plains Cultural Centre is a fantastic and dynamic space - well worth visiting. My fellow shadow-weavers are: Sarah Breen Lovett, Ona Janzen and Kayo Yokoyama.

Jacqueline Spedding, In the Shadow of a Dream, 2014. Found objects, natural materials, ceramic, tissue paper, steel specimen pins, charcoal. Copyright of the artist.