Katherine Spindler’s artistic process is essentially one guided by intuition before and above concept. As such, it is difficult, and perhaps inappropriate, to attempt to describe an overarching impetus for this new collection of work, entitled To Hold Time. The very title indicates an impossible act, which is nevertheless ubiquitously attempted, in the ways we continually endeavour to contain and explain time, to endow it with meaning and parameters, to master it, direct it.
Spindler’s consideration of time is one played out on a personal, empathetic and phenomenological scale rather than one concerned with objective or scientific measuring. Time becomes a question of our ways of being, of understanding, of navigating. The artist looks to how we navigate life through gesture, ritual, routine and rhythm. Fragmentary gestures are made monumental, while monuments – such as Spindler’s reoccurring lighthouse – are rendered fragmentary and diaphanous.
The relationship and interaction between fragment and whole is thus core to this body of work. It is especially evident in the large scale assemblages which re-enact a mechanism essential to Spindler’s practice – a meditative act of collecting, arranging and rearranging images, texts and objects in a constant engagement with the ways in which meaning can be framed, reframed, and disordered. This relationship between fragment and whole in turn contains within it tensions between knowledge and instinct, containment and release, empathy and scrutiny. It is through quiet intuition that Spindler navigates these tensions, and it is through this same intuition that the viewer should seek to be guided through the works collected here.
