“Amorphous and the temporality of rice paper is an impossible attempt to collapse time. It may appear that the past is the frozen moment captured by the sculpture’s form, but it is more accurately many moments that are frozen into one form since the rice paper continues to shift as it dries. Rice paper embodies this relationship as each sculpture holds a material memory of a body’s labour, but is essentially hollow and translucent. The present is the moment the viewer encounters the work, but this understanding is also anachronistic as multiple viewers over the course of the exhibit could be encountering the work at different times or simultaneously. Similarly, the sculptures are physically formed with gravity but are hollow. The rice paper forms define space but do not fill it. As a series of sculptures, the future is every other sculpture the viewer is not looking at. The forms are one of many infinite permutations yet to come.

My artistic practice questions how material can mediate meaning. I am interested in how recontextualizing a material can make it both a physical property and a series of relations to space. My attention to how materials can rearrange and transform space manifests itself in site-specific installations. Subverting the static nature of sculpture, my art practice examines the potential for material to shift in form and function. My sculptures and installations are often in flux and challenge what it means to be in the past, present and future.”

Hilary Hung graduated with a BA with Distinction in Studio Art from the University of Guelph, 2017.