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Floorplan Studio is based in Cadigal country, part of the Eora Nation nowadays referred to as Sydney, Australia. The Gadigal People are part of seven clans in the Eora Nation and have an extensive culture, ecology, stories and songlines unique to their region. Floorplan pays respect to First Nations people and their Elders, Past, Present and Emerging.
Copyright 2023, Floorplan Studio
Sharing in this collective body of water, the object and subject blur, beginning a process of vitality and decay—shaped entirely by the their own waterbody and its habits.
Name
Medium
Dimensions
For Sale?
Not for sale
Found oil painting, duct tape, wooden pallet and polyester tie-downs
Buckshot / Salvage, 2019 - 2023
98 x 97 x 15 cm
Name
Medium
Dimensions
For Sale?
$450 each
Plaster, sand, dirt, organic matter, plastic and glass
Traces / A Point Along a Line, 2022
50 x 70 x 4 cm
Name
Medium
Dimensions
For Sale?
Not for sale
Steel, HDPE, paracord and wire
Gibbet, 2022
69 x 39 x 39 cm
Mungo Howard
Mungo Howard is an emerging artist based in Sydney and is a recent Masters of Fine Art
graduate from the National Art School, Darlinghurst. His practice stems from personal
encounters with found, cast-off material – broadly encompassed by the topic of ruins. Often seen through the lens of painting, this focus on broken materiality finds overlaps in contemporary material culture studies as it involves a kind of archaeological orientation.
These pieces have emerged from working with found, cast-off material. These are things that
I’ve happened upon, by chance whilst walking, that are then taken back to the studio to be
reworked in various ways. My preference for these kinds of materials is primarily for aesthetic reasons, but there’s also an ecological aspect when collecting and reusing discarded things.
Recently I’ve been thinking about this way of working as a form of anonymous collaboration
with unwitting contributors (some human, some not), though perhaps this is inevitable when
using found objects. The fact that these things are not in pristine condition but are worn, broken or collapsing in a kind of entropic decline makes it easier to tease out alternative roles for them, freed from their intended functions or ‘use-value.'
Artwork Statement
With Buckshot / Salvage, a quintessentially portable art object (a stretched landscape painting) is strapped to a newer symbol of global trade and tentatively held together with jagged pieces of black plastic duct tape, a DIY repair or conservator’s nightmare. So at what point does an idyllic landscape scene become a memento more?
Traces / A Point Along a Line is an alternative take on the landscape genre, but not exactly representational. Liquid plaster poured directly onto the dirt of a well trodden path, its solidified surface retaining a negative of the topography along with all the fragments of debris there at a particular moment in time – like a photographic trace. A most basic (and base) form of casting.
With Gibbet, a fragment of melted wheelie bin torched by anonymous suburban vandals is suspended within the legs of an old barstool as a small mobile. Any slippage between the industrial and the organic seems appropriate – after all HDPE is made from refined fossilised life.
