Otomys is pleased to present Out of Hand, bringing together sculptor Joel Sorensen and painter Dee Donaldson, showing 27 August - 11 September.
Joel Sorensen’s sculptures are built through accumulation and reduction in equal measure. Found timber carved and burned, cement built up in thick gestural strokes retain the memory of the hands that shaped them. In Serenade, two braided columns of scorched sugar gum rise and lean toward one another, their woven surfaces suggesting muscle or plaited fibre, perhaps anthropomorphic figures reaching upwards, caught mid-growth and not yet resolved into stillness. The scorching is a slow, deliberate act, undertaken with the same patience as the carving itself; charring the wood to reveals the delicate grain beneath the surface.
Elsewhere, in Moondog, Flight and Wings of Desire form tips toward flight; wings and blade-like shapes caught at the moment of release, rough-hewn and unglazed, closer to geological formation than to feather. Each work carries the weight of its maker, the steady, repetitive labour of the hand is legible in every ridge and cut.
Where Donaldson’s bodies struggle and cluster at the centre of the frame, Sorensen’s forms hold their shape with quiet stillness -a counterpoint born of the same intuition, the same trust in what emerges when material is worked, slowly and attentively, out of hand.
