Kate Just is well known for creating tactile sculptures and installations reinterpreting historic, mythic and iconographic objects and figures often linked to women's histories. In all her works, Just forefronts the materiality of bodily experience, and its transformative effect on identity.
Just's new work Unearthed consists of a six metre row of 46 unusual tools modelled with a blue-black resin based clay. Displayed on table fitted with a rugged canvas tool roll, Just's gently-curved pewter-like sculptures were inspired by her overseas research in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. Curious about the types of tools and implements used by or on women throughout history, Just poured through Egyptian, Medieval, Greek, Roman, Textile/Costume, Arts of the Americas and Arts of Africa collections across both sites. Initially selecting tools which might be said to reflect, probe, cut, and mark the female body in particular, including mirrors, cosmetic implements, surgical and gynaecological tools and tattoo tools, Just began to extend her archive further. She began including objects which seemed like natural extensions of bodies, seemed to hold magical or personal allure to their long gone owners, subtly referenced the shapes, movements or contours of human bodies themselves, and whose creators were once said to be men though this was now in question. These included spoons, spindles, hand saws, stone-carving tools, mallets, letter openers and tiny sewing scissors. Sketching and sculpting the works in clay, Just simplified and altered many of the forms she had studied, amalgamated various tools, invented her own, and attached bodily parts to a few which look like breasts, hands, hair styles, hips, spines or pelvis'. These oddly shaped new-old tools, laid out in a row, hover above individual pockets, reflecting each object's unique size. Like letters or a script, they write a story: of the way bodies touch and are touched by certain objects and the effects on 'self' that this has.
Resources
Essay by Martha McDonald
Essay by Craig Burgess
Feature article by Liza Power, The Saturday Age
Download pricelist here
This exhibition has been kindly supported by the City of Melbourne.
Photography: Lily Feng
