Dale Waters’ current series of perspex works is concerned with the commonplace domestic objects that inhabit our daily existence; rugs, soft furnishings, packaging. Domestic objects form a backdrop to our everyday life, their presence carries meaning, and memory. These objects are frequently endowed with historical and ambivalent emotional investment, the accumulation of hundreds of years of experience. Our memories of a domestic life often arise from the personal environment we assemble; the cultural and personal associations inherent in the objects, as well as the emotional experiences associated with our domestic life.
Waters’ work is often concerned with the function of domestic objects in materialising the construction of self-identity. She is attentive to objects that lose form and functionality; the ignored object that forms part of the clutter, the mundane. When the object is isolated from its familiar context and function, it takes on a value divorced from its usefulness. There is a sense of the disruption of the familiar. Her work operates within the tension of the act of doing and undoing; sometimes a desire for perfection, at other times an insistent imperfection, but always an objectification of desire in the making, unmaking and remaking of the material world. Being attentive to impermanence, sentience and consciousness, she works within the contradiction of the aesthetics of decay and destruction and the implied infinitude of the pattern.
The mark making is a physical manifestation of the artist having been present in the moment, the image itself a record of successive moments and impermanence. The complexities of intricacies and forms challenge perception- these objects facilitate a process of contemplative meditation, of getting lost in the reality of an ordinary object. The image is constructed of thousands of small gestures-the artist’s intention, time and physical intervention; a consideration that meaning is the unfolding of the interrelationship between subject and object.