About Parcels - Painting

In Brief:

The Parcel series grew from a fascination with grids, exploring containment, enclosure and exclusion. Wrapping parcels became a way to embody these concepts, with each parcel as a microcosm within a larger structure, leading to the Exclusion Zone paintings and the Mutual Exclusion Zone Installation. This work opened new avenues of inquiry and was recognised with a Pollock-Krasner Foundation award. 

Context:

The genesis of the Parcel series and artifacts stemmed from a fascination with grid formations. Within the paintings, the grid form served as both a tangible presence and a conceptual framework, embodying notions of containment and structure. Initial explorations of grids involved mapping the underlying structure of the canvas, a structure I was deeply aware of from my time as weaver and textile artist aswell as being inspired in part by Rosalind Krauss's seminal essay "Grid" from ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths’

Deeper into the concept of grids, I explored terms like containment, enclosure, and exclusion, words that resonated with the act of wrapping parcels. The process of wrapping parcels, paralleled the act of isolating something within a specific sector of a grid, the materials used for wrapping symbolized the grid lines.

Making these artifacts, opened new avenues of exploration to me which led to yet different paths of inquiry.

The concept of the Exclusion Zone emerged from the idea of each individual parcel functioning as a microcosm within a larger grid, the parcel’s contents represented the interior of a sector, while everything outside of it remained excluded. The idea of mutual exclusion, when applied to multiple parcels, created an impression of entities that are linked but remain completely distinct from one another. In work on the Exclusion Zone paintings, the canvas had to be in a horizontal position, giving it a very different perspective. That perspective led to the creation of the Mutual Exclusion Zone Installation.

When I started making parcels, other pathways of interest opened up, I followed them. 

This work led to an award from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in New York:

 https://www.pkf-imagecollection.org/artist/Linda_Sgoluppi/works/list/  

Linda Sgoluppi Art