Helen Robertson

A pool of gloss black acrylic paint floats on clear melinex film, suspended from the ceiling on nylon thread. It hangs low so that one views the space and other works through it and on its reflective surface. At close proximity, the viewer's own reflection is truncated both by the black pool and the edge of the melinex film. The piece has a rough provisional quality; the melinex film is ruckled and dented in places and the threads are crudely knotted through holes strengthened with layers of masking tape that have been stuck on in a deliberately ad hoc way.

The black and white aspect of the exhibition was used as a springboard to explore notions of polarity; illusion and materiality, transparency and opacity, surface and depth, perfection and imperfection, body and spirit, matter and anti-matter. The work has multiple reference points that hold each other in check, the circular black pool being suggestive of abstract painting, an aperture, a well, a black hole...... The fragility of the melinex sheet and its sensitivity to air currents gives the work an ephemeral live quality which is enhanced by views of the actual space and the viewer's own living, breathing body.