Each day this week is in excess of 40 degrees; a haze of heat radiates from the city’s broad bitumen roads, its hardened surface becoming unbound as tar seperates from aggregate, its tacky surgace lifitng as vehicles roll across. Incrementally, our constructed environments yield to non-human activity; our anthropocenic stratum quietly disrupted and reclaimed. Expansive areas of road and concrete become geological layers with the potential for microclimates, faults, and erosion to occur.

Influenced by the material and spatial language of 1960s minimalist sculpture and the Mono-Ha movement of Japan, Melting act draws out the poetic failings of industrial materials and their relationship to deep time. Acts of casting allow one transient layer to be recorded within another, embedding within itself generative histories of time, forces, action, and repair. Melting act is a sculptural exploration of our relationship with shifting climates and built spaces in the current age of the Anthropocene.

Bernadette Klavins is an emerging artist who works primarily within the field of sculpture. In 2016, Klavins graduated with a Bachelor of Visual Arts (First Class Honours) from Adelaide Central School of Art, after which she completed a month-long residency at The Icelandic Association of Visual Art in Reykjavik in 2017. Klavins has held solo exhibitions at FELTspace (2016) and Floating Goose Studios (2018), and most recently, has presented a collaborative exhibition with Bridget Currie at Adelaide Central Gallery (2019).