We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art stands and recognise the creative contribution First Australians make to the art and culture of this country.
Stuart Ringholt / Australia b.1971 / Double pencil 2008 / Painted wood and graphite on wooden presentation box: Object: 0.7 x 10.9 x 0.7cm; presentation box: 4.1 x 16.6 x 5.2cm (complete) / Purchased 2011. Ivy Lillian Walton Bequest / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Stuart Ringholt
Stuart RingholtDouble pencil 2008
Not Currently on Display
Double pencil takes the common object of a graphite pencil and places it on top of a humble ply presentation box. In so doing, Stuart Ringholt raises the status of a everyday item into an object of artistic merit. The playful elevation of a pencil is doubled by a fusion that at once hybridises and confuses.
Ringholt’s Double pencil is not doubly useful – this hybrid is rendered dysfunctional. The work invites playful debate about the role of art, the use of found objects in the work a sculptor, the difference between art and design, the line between form and function.
Stuart Ringholt’s practice challenges and disorientates by playing on audience expectation. In his performance works he flouts customary bounds of social interaction and self-awareness by purposefully constructing embarrassing situations that threaten the ego.
In his ‘aerosol’ set of sculptures, Ringholt repurposes familiar objects, recasting Coca-Cola beverage cans with aerosol spray nozzles in the manner of fly-spray or deodorant. Ringholt’s objects serve obtuse or impossible functions that deny logic. Following the tradition of the Readymade, they dryly continue modern art’s penchant for the marriage of the unexpected. Funny and serious, these works play on our fears of disorder, delusion, illness and dysfunction with irreverent slapstick.