Opening the loop by Harry Copas at ANCA Gallery 29 March–16 April 2023

Harry Copas is a Western Sydney artist, working between unceded Bidjigal, Dharug and Gadigal lands. His research-based practice spans multiple disciplines, focusing on the materiality of places and objects through the lens of personal and collective histories.

Opening the loop investigates new ways of working with materials and sites to blend research with notions of care, repair and recontextualisation. The installations emerge from the artist’s cross disciplinary interest in textiles, painting and sculpture, and utilise found materials commonly associated with the building industry—breaking away from traditional hierarchies of value. The coarse materiality of the works is met, head on, by an underlying sense of care. In their reconstruction and repair these works are asking: How can we disrupt the cycles of construction and deconstruction?  

Copas’ installations act as spatial interventions that inhibit and direct the viewer’s movement through the gallery space; mirroring the ways in which private development often encroaches on public spaces. Time, too, plays a role in the works exhibited and manifests itself in different ways. The countless hours spent behind a sewing machine document the months a piece of worthless builder’s cloth spent shredding itself in the wind. Plasterboard dust is cast into an object intended to be much stronger than its original form. Demolition rubble, from Sydney dwellings across the last century, is suspended in a conglomerate of lost histories and memories. 

Ultimately however, the works’ ephemeral nature means they exist only as disruptions, interfering with the flow of all things that we find ourselves a part of. Without such disruptions, the current material flow (aided by unsustainable practices of destruction and development) remains unchallenged. How can we close the cycle without opening the loop first?

Harry Copas, The wait of it all, 2021, granite, construction fence, dimensions variable.