Augusta Vinall Richardson (b. 1991, l. Naarm/Melbourne) works with sheet and cast metals in the production of abstract composite sculpture. Each modular element is created individually and has its own integrity and idiosyncratic form but becomes part of a larger, typically box-like assemblage. Her process of making begins on paper and this sense of the ephemeral is retained in the final work in metal.
Vinall Richardson’s works occupy an aesthetic space adjacent to serious modernist sculpture but retain a generosity of the handmade. Her objects, suspended, free-standing and wall-based in stainless steel, aluminium and bronze, utilize the materials and machinery of industry in their making though convey an experience of making and of perception that is substantially more tender. The artist has said that her “tools and equipment are like personalities one must get to know”. This sense of the complex of interpersonal relationships between viewer and object is embedded in her work.
Vinall Richardson’s templates, maquettes and moulds are hand-drawn on paper, constructed out of recycled cardboard and adhesive tapes and papier-mâché respectively. These paper models are palpable in finished metal forms and surfaces. In the process of transferring the subtleties of one material to another, the artist draws attention to the otherwise incidental material aesthetics of her studies and the sentience of her processes. Sometimes these provisional containers of future forms are exhibited as objects in their own right before being destroyed during their translation to metal. The hand is ever-present in her final objects with further individuation in surface finishing and edge softening. She obliterates the conundrum between object and support by giving equal but different consideration to both. Vinall Richardson’s early work and education was in textile design and later drawing. The knowledge of and impulse towards material pliability still underpins her work in metals in an ongoing dialogue unfolding between ephemera and permanence of materials and process.
Vinall Richardson has exhibited widely in commercial and artist-run-initiatives. In 2022, she was awarded a Master of Fine Art by Monash University, Melbourne. As part of her undergraduate studies at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, she undertook an exchange semester at Gerrit Reitveld Academie in Amsterdam. She exhibited in the group exhibition LIGHTMOVING at The Commercial in 2022 and in Circles of dialogue curated by Amelia Wallin at La Trobe Art Institute in 2023.
Collections: Celine (FR), Lendlease