I want to be building sculptures within the landscape, rather than obstructing it.
- Emma Lamb
Imagine a sculpture that makes its presence felt by being almost invisible. It’s not an easy premise, but it is exactly what two young artists and sculptors have done with their first work, winning awards for it along the way. It’s a remarkable first piece, beautiful and subtle and strangely haunting.
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Emma Lamb and Gabrielle Hingston are two former Loreto College students who are studying landscape design, photography and graphics in Melbourne. Their sculpture “Infinity Blocks” won the $500 Dunkeld People’s Choice award at the Lost in Sculpture exhibition in 2015.
It’s now on display at the Ballarat Botanical Gardens as part of the Sculpture Garden in the Begonia Festival. Emma Lamb And Gabrielle Hingston were interviewed as part of the “What’s Art Got To Do With It?” series for The Courier.
Emma Lamb: “Gabrielle and I have known each other for 10 or 12 years but we went to different universities, she did photography and graphic design and I did a Bachelor of Design-Landscape Architecture. Our backgrounds work really well together because I’ve got the technical design background and Gab has some wonderful, fun ideas.
“For a work like this, first and foremost we approach it through the medium, which was mirrors that we had collected from offcuts at glass shops and hard rubbish and so on. We thought about the reflective aspect of mirrors, of course, and then the landscape. All the sculptures, when I think of them, are ones that will be outside. I’ve done a lot of reading on light studies, on the geometry of pieces like this, because it would have turned out completely differently if we had pursued jagged lines rather than parallel lines.”
Gabrielle Hingston: “I can’t think of any artists that inspired me in particular, but optical illusions and surrealism – the whole illusion side to the transparency of it, optical illusions, inspired me. It’s built out of blocks into a pyramid shape and it’s quite a large sculpture.
“It was pretty magical when it came together because I don’t think we expected that outcome (of its invisibility). We couldn’t envision that in our workspace. It really did become invisible and blend in.”
Emma Lamb and Gabrielle Hingston will continue to work together into the future as a sculptural team.
