“Pulp Fictions”
Jonas Ropponen and Andy Hutson
17 May → 8 June 2013

Ropponen and Hutson are both sculptors who work with paper-mâché. It is the basic process of creating paper-mâché – essentially the dismantling and reconfiguration of materials – that forms the central trope of this project. The artists have established a simple system of exchange: an object is selected – a book, a sculpture, a pot plant, an email – and is reconfigured by the other in their studio, creating a new entity. The resultant works, and their cumulative narratives, will form the body of the exhibition.

The intention is to activate systems of production that allow for haphazard, imperfect answers to incomplete questions. Pulp Fictions is an attempt to transfer the chaos of the studio into the gallery, to return phenomena to the ambiguity of the world.

Andy Hutson is a softly spoken artist from Melbourne with a messianic hairdo and accompanying beard. His gentle eyes belie that he is a papier mâché machine. Not a machine made of the stuff, but a mechanical wonderworker in the guise of flesh. Through rapid sleight of hand, Andy has pumped out boots, bananas, little birds, hothouse flowers and life-sized replicas of moving vans in papier mâché over the past eight years or so. He has done so in such proliferation that the storage of the aforementioned artefacts not already housed in various national and private collections surely poses a considerable fire hazard. — Jonas Ropponen, March, 2013

Jonas Ropponen is a 34 year old artist and diarist. In the 1970’s he was born into a tree-worshiping cult in Sweden, but escaped at the age of 11, when he stowed away on a fishing boat bound for Australia. In part as a way of absorbing childhood memories and old emotional wounds, Jonas took to chewing pages of childhood books – a habit which eventually led him to discover the joys of paper-mâché sculpture, which he practices to this day. He also enjoys cycling, word games, pickled herrings and long walks on the beach. — Andy Hutson, March, 2013

Install photography: Kim Jaeger.