Mark Hislop lives and works in Melbourne.
Mark completed a Master of Art at Chelsea School of Art and Design, London in 1994 and was awarded a Samstag International Visual Art Scholarship in 1993. He has been the recipent of Australia Council New Work Grants in 1995 and 2000. His work has been exhibited in Australia and overseas in London and New York and his work is held in a number of public collections including Artbank, University of Western Sydney and BHP Biliton.
Mark was a finalist in the Dobell Prize for Drawing at AGNSW in 2009 and 2010 as well as a finalist in the Paul Guest Prize 2010, Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria and the Rick Amor Drawing Prize, Art Gallery of Ballarat, Victoria in 2010 and 2014. Mark was awarded the People's Choice Award in Art on paper, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, Sydney, 2009 and the People's Choice Award in the Adelaide Perry Drawing Prize PLC, Sydney in 2009.
In 2015 Mark will be taking up the Australia Council for the Arts studio residency in Helsinki.
IMPOSSIBLE MOMENTS: FLIGHT EXPERIMENTS 2014/15
These drawings use photography both as a source and reference point in considering how we experience and remember the world. In the series Flight experiments, a human hand presents the viewer with a series of objects that appear suspended, defying gravity. Imparting stillness, these works suggest that it is not only the objects that appear suspended, but time itself.
The idea of time has been integral to much of Mark Hislop’s work over many years. A large double portrait Double time 2012 began with the artist shaving his head, taking of photograph of his head from behind (as if being looked at by someone else) and drawing from the photographic image, moving like a ink-jet printer, plotting its path from from left to right to produce a photorealistic drawing. Completing the work over 3 weeks he then re-photographed his head, again from behind, revealing new hair growth - and began the next drawing. The finished diptych, a double portrait, was symbolic of the period between the two images, as well as the time it took to complete the work.
Hislop’s interest in time extends beyond the fascination with mortality to more pragmatic approaches relating to how we use, display, manipulate, objectify time. In another work from 2014 titled Our reflections are infinite the artist depicts a 1970s clock radio with its rounded curves, faux timber veneer and its flip-clock time mechanism. The time is set on the impossible moment 00:00 and is reflected in the mirrored surface on which the clock stands as two infinity symbols.
Being an indentical twin it is easy to see Hislop’s prediliction to ideas of reflection/inversion/duplication. Many of his works offer a doubling or mirroring of text or image that can be attributed the artist’s interest in analogue photography and it’s basic tenants of positive/negative, duplication and reproduction. For instance in the work titled Flight experiment 6, a hand holds a disc-like arrangement of letters forming the word ‘mind’ that is reflected immediately below to produce the word ‘wind’.
Many of the works are developed slowly using drawing in a way that intentionally slows the process of making and looking, imparting a stillness to the work that rewinds our our belief in what we are looking at.
MARK HISLOP: THE INBETWEEN 2012
Michael Reid Gallery, Sydney
44 Roslyn Gardens,
Elizabeth Bay,
NSW 2011 Australia
Telephone +61 2 8353 3500The Inbetween continues my investigations in portraiture and presents a series of works on paper and mylar that subvert the face as portraiture’s recognized symbol. These works suggest that body language and unconscious minute physical gestures - such as a tilt of the head, the sweep of the hair or the slant of the shoulders- reveal something about who we are.
These works have much in common with photography, both as the source for images and a reference point in considering how we picture and remember the world. Working on mylar, the images evolve slowly through the accumulation of a series of tiny dots of graphite suspension onto the surface of transparent film. The technique hints at the experience of images in print and on screen, existing between the wet darkroom process and the pixelation of contemporary digital image. If interference on a screen can temporarily remind us that the image is mediated, these drawings on mylar remind us of the experience of looking and the contradictions of such an experience.