Drawing blood from a stone

Selekta exhibition, Westspace, Melbourne 2006, by Kate Shaw

Sanné Mestrom’s watercolours on paper are sublime meditations on space whilst dealing intelligently with the tension between pictorial space and material surface. Vision is made reflexive: it becomes unclear whether we are looking at perspectival articulations of space, or translucent solids. Mestrom’s work a ‘The history of space is the history of Wars’ is reminiscent of a secular version of Bernini’s sculpture ‘ The Ecstasy of Saint Therese’, where the light of god is rendered as sculptural form. However Mestrom brings us into the 21st century, the church’s tools of illusion, one and two point perspective, have given way to a multi-faceted ripple effect, a depiction of Chaos Theory perhaps? Or a globalized world linked in every possible way to become as Mestrom’s says ‘an immaterial but unbroken tissue’.

Mestrom’s works for Selecta, introduce color to her usual monochromatic practice. Like her other works the viewer’s perception of surface and space are simultaneously fragmented and whole; a warm hued shard pierces a paper-like plane whilst collapsing and flattening onto its surface. Colour will no doubt bring new perceptual and metaphorical dimension to Mestrom’s practice. As she said in relation to the introduction of colour to her work was like, (as it is titled), ‘drawing blood from a stone’.