Photo documentation by Salad Hilowle and Florence Wild.

Local Haunts

“You will often find us at our local haunts, drinking cheap beers and talking about, around, and across each other on what we are doing, planning, potentially regretting. Ideas (like tongues) become a bit looser after a few drinks, ideas later deemed to be ridiculous, but which here, at our local haunt, get their 15 seconds of fame. They float in the air above the fake wood tables, between the dishwasher-worn glasses and the ubiquitous tea lights.”

In Local Haunts, friends Joran Stamatakakos and Florence Wild present a collection of reworked and reassembled paintings, sculptures and wall works that reflect on mostly invisible (but often audible) aspects of making. Those conversations, links, texts, chats, studio talks, vernissage discussions, bar hangs, rants, doubts, affirmations and decisions that make up the tissue of close friendships and art practices. Both spectral and tangible, like a low fog or giant wobbly blob of jelly.

This ongoing back-and-forth is the other side of our often solitary labours of working, accumulating, drawing, note-making. Half-spun ideas from our local haunts are pocketed away in scribbled notes, phone memos, ‘I-will-remember-this’ memories, until there is time to get to in the small confines of studio to uncork them beneath the unforgiving perpetual daylight fluorescent tubes.

We shared a studio for a short time after art school, but were seldom there together. Joran wasn’t very well, and had little energy to leave the house. In studio, I mainly lay on the couch and knitted spools of fishing line, trying to settle in, but not really succeeding. When Joran left and went back to Australia, dismantling the studio, I saved scraps of the old paintings he destroyed. He threw away most of his things, only to have the belongings he’d decided to hold on to lost in the murky depths of shipping transit.

I, on the other hand, am a saver - a stockpiler and collector of things that may one day come in handy. I stayed in Sweden, moved studios and took whatever might come in useful with me. These remnants, traces of other’s lives and events re-emerge in the works shown here, in found and saved materials, in the knitted sculptures often rolled for ease of storage, and those painting scraps reframing canvases.

Local Haunts uses each other’s works as support structures to build up, hang against and rest upon, referencing the way we use each other to propel and realise our endeavours.

Local haunts are the conversations, work spaces and social spheres we inhabit, as support structures and points of anchorage. For this show we have worked closely together in my studio, riffing off one another, letting ideas stack up and spiral off, imbuing the works with a sense of familiarity, a trading of jokes and anecdotes.

-Florence Wild, January 2020

Browsing Library

Handmade table of 5 perspex sheets and silver tape. Collection of non-fiction, exhibition catalogues, crime fiction, novels, album reviews, architecture, art theory and library books.