Chris Packer
The Waves
04.03.20 – 21.03.20

This project revisits a series I made back in 2013 called The Planes, which showed at Factory 49 in Sydney. The lines in those works described a set of intersecting planes, each bisecting the space. There were no planes when you looked at the works, only straight lines. You had to parse out the lines of each colour, and then apprehend them in combination across the space.

The present show is very similar – and completely different. Taking advantage of Five Walls gallery four’s fifth wall to reveal the effect of this across a sample of the space, I’ve allowed the angles of corresponding lines to vary. Where before the lines on opposite walls would be more or less parallel, giving us imaginary intersecting planes, we now have to try to imagine twisting waves.

I don’t know if anyone can readily visualise these waves – and strictly speaking they may not even be waves, since that would seem to imply some kind of consistent pattern. Let’s just say they are ‘wavy’, like sheets flapping in the wind, except that they are passing through each other as they do so.
That’s where the abstraction starts to get a bit too much for our poor homo sapiens brains. But the work is also very much grounded in the concrete. The ‘lines’ are cotton tape, and they can’t just run through each other, they have to go under or over. The weave that results from doing this sequentially I find very satisfying. I’m sure that’s something in our DNA.

Chris Packer, Feb 2020