Rendering
Chris Mules
6 June - 3 July 2008

Moroccan architect Rachid Haloui comments that Arabs living in the desert found the emptiness so frightening that they found a way to formally control the vastness of the space, a kind of measuring, with their style of building. The symmetry of Moroccan Fassi houses is based around the square and the rectangle and is used as a way of making space intelligible.

Grids are a common human endeavour whether they are precise or haphazard. They can be meticulously planned, grow from necessity, interest or tradition. We instinctually consider space and have our own personalised understandings of what constitutes emptiness and what we do with it. Landmarks are commonly used as points of reference for spatial negotiation. Indigenous Australians incorporate landmarks in their sung maps and song lines, enabling them to travel long distances while continuing to recite. Any alteration of the landscape that gave rise to these maps ultimately renders them unusable.

For many there are places of nothingness, of emptiness with no obvious shore or landing place that can engender a primal fear. Responses can cause the fragmenting of a self that will leave or expose remnants. The feeling of emptiness can be experienced in the largest city, a vast, open plain, the biggest building, the narrowest of valleys, and the tiniest crack. It depends on the viewer and how they have personally integrated learned uses and experiences of space. Understandings of architectural space are also cultural, political and social.

The ‘Rendering’ series of works, of which this is number 3, are site specific in that they are a built response to found objects from domestic interiors. They give the idea of architectural connecting while being nothing more than drawings in space that attempt to contain and explain. They are ‘rendered’ piece by piece with the only ‘plan’ being the using of domestic found objects, designated materials and 45 degree angles.

Chris Mules