Eloise Dethier-Eaton & Jenna Coombs

THRESHOLD is a duo show where two artists will come together at 1B Window Gallery to find the common ground between their distinct practices.

JENNA COOMBS works primarily within installation, sound and moving image, creating immersive experiences for the viewer. She is interested in the impact of the external and physical environments we inhabit on our individual ability to internally process, function and communicate. Jenna’s work rhythmically discusses what it means to exist as emotional, physical, and interconnected beings. She picks at the scabs of pain and grief whilst offering reconciliation and reassurance in the ability to find oneself within her pieces. Jenna understands grief as a liminal space; a time and place that holds her captive whilst the world continues to operate senselessly around her. To portray this psychological state, Jenna will piece together discarded bits of wood with newer ones to create a puppet. In doing so, she hopes to reflect on the many histories and stories that wood holds. As it carries the energy from a living organism that once breathed life, wood has a past, present and a future. In this sense, this material allows Jenna to articulate her relationship with grief, which similarly requires oneself to piece together their old with some new in order to find new ways of functioning and understanding the world around them.

ELOISE DETHIER-EATON is a visual artist whose still life compositions tell the stories behind objects. She draws upon the decorative to reflect on the environmental challenges we face today, and to examine what aesthetic, material, economic and emotional value we attribute to objects. She is particularly interested in the concept of waste and how an object’s value can fluctuate when time and labour are invested in reusing, restoring or repurposing a previously discarded item. She believes there is hope in bestowing value through acts of the handmade, whereby something that is considered worthless and destined for landfill can instead be imbued with renewed potential. Eloise’s sculptural installation evokes those moments when material off-cuts are glimpsed on the margins, leaning to the side of a construction site or on the street pavement. At first appearance these seem to be panels of wood, stone and marble. In reality however, they are discarded boards that the artist has found then painted to mimic those materials, following the trompe-l’oeil tradition. By using these illusionistic painting techniques, Eloise hopes to engineer uncanny moments of surprise when viewers realise they have been tricked, thus
undermining the preconceived notions of value and hierarchy that we assign to materials. This show will be divided in two parts. At first, the artists will occupy the space at 1B Window Gallery and let the work unfold as part of a residency; then the gallery will operate as an exhibition space for the finished work.