Introduction

Sarah Gory

‘Toward the center of the field there is a slight mound,’ writes Rosalind Krauss in her seminal essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ (1979), from which this project takes its name, ‘a swelling in the earth, which is the only warning given for the presence of the work.’

This is an apt description for how we, here, have approached art writing. On the surface, many of these texts may not look or read how you imagine art writing should look or read. We are, after all, not art historians or art critics but writers. However, if you pay attention, you will notice the slight swelling, the subtle indicators that link these texts to visual artworks in myriad ways—thematically, conceptually, formally, aesthetically. Below the surface, if you read closely enough, you will find the scaffolding, the brushstrokes, the hinges.

Here, our intention is not to replicate artworks in textual form nor write about artworks. Rather, we are bringing together visual and textual languages in exciting and new ways. We seek to write with art, to find a space that we could not have reached without this interdisciplinary collaboration.

The two exhibitions that form the visual underpinning of this publication are Melbourne Now at NGV Australia (2023) and nightshifts at Buxton Contemporary (2023). In many ways, the two shows couldn’t be more different. The former was an expansive and ambitious blockbuster exhibition celebrating art and craft making across our fair city; the latter a carefully curated, meditative exhibition exploring artistic solitude and interiority. This diversity of form and content is echoed in the range of texts produced for this publication.

Beneath the frames, you will find an array of pieces that use text-based forms to play with visual languages in distinct and unique ways. And yet you will also find a host of beautifully tangled threads. Taken individually these texts are works of art; take together they represent a tapestry of interlinked ideas, concepts, thinking.

Focus on the ramifications of the rapidly-advancing world of technology we find ourselves in is a recurring theme—and fitting, given the digital format of this publication. The impact of the digital on our lives is explored formally through a hyperlinked text that turns the surveilling eye back on the reader, as well as conceptually through romantic interactions with AI, or a nostalgic trip back through browsing history. Indeed, nostalgia is another linking thread, with writers looking back at childhood memories, homes they’ve lived in, the people they used to be and the bodies that they inhabit. In this way time itself becomes a thematic thread—its relentless forward march but also the way that it loops back on itself, creates overlaps and fissures across space. The form and aesthetics of the many texts in this publication are equally diverse, from poetry and epistolary writing to fragmented texts, essays, mathematical equations, metaphoric meditations …

To return to Rosalind Krauss, this project takes seriously the imperative ‘to explore a deeper set of questions that pertain to something more than mapping and involve instead the problem of explanation.’ Though we pose no answers, we seek to use the language of art–textual, visual—to explore and explain the worlds in which we all live.