text and floorsheet from 'Recess' group show at cafe Gallery, December 2025
@c_a_f_e__
Text by moi,
Full text below
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In primary school, recess was a scheduled chunk of time to cease formalities and do whatever you wanted, within reason, under partial supervision with practical rules in place to keep order, but not to inhibit play. Don’t run near the fence, don’t climb too high, no fighting. To rest, perhaps...or contradictingly, behave uncontrollably. I recall speculating daily where I was going to situate myself for the break – in circles with friends, chasing one another aimlessly. The level of determination was so concentrated, foreseeing plans to accelerate through the grounds or roam around the perimeter of the school. As a temporal cut in time, recess was a moment of whimsy tinged with a subtle sense of risk; innocence with an underlying thrill of uncertainty; both carefree and faintly perilous. Recess was a release.
Artworks in Recess explore sensibilities of depth and relief, shallow withdrawals and quiet resistances. The word evokes a physical indentation. Across artists’ practices, ‘recess’ becomes both condition and strategy. Words, objects and materials recede or protrude from the wall, with an emphasis on intervals or reduction, ‘breaks’ and in-between states of material and surface. Repetitious voids, multiplicities of circles and cut or inverted silhouettes each enact distinct, cyclical rhythms of labour; decisive, controlled or loose. Bending rules, sometimes literally, artworks subvert the expectations of a medium, engaging with discipline as both a field of practice and a reflective framework. Traced, cut, subtracted, embedded, hollowed, constructed; artworks are driven by material explorations cultivated through processes that carve out an unrestrained space within the serious language of art, ceasing formalities and climbing too high.
— Text by Lilly Skipper
