BEYOND | Paul Yore on Wonderment and Conjuring Paradoxical Connections Through His Works

Harnessing the monumental exhibition spaces within the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, BEYOND presents three large-scale installations and spatial interventions from leading contemporary artists. As part of BEYOND, Paul Yore will present FUCK ME DEAD, a vibrantly mosaiced hearse, upcycled and modified from an iconic Australian car, the  ’70s Ford Fairlane. His new series, Souvenir, will also feature in a solo show at the Fair, presented by STATION.

Melbourne Art Fair speaks with Paul about his installation, facilitating a deeper engagement with works through the interplay between the macro and micro, and conjuring paradoxical associations through imagery.

Paul Yore’s work for BEYOND is presented by STATION (Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney) and Hugo Michell Gallery (Tarntanya/Adelaide).

 

How did your work which will be exhibited for BEYOND, FUCK ME DEAD originally come about? 

The origin point for all my work is wonderment. I follow my curiosity about the world, about objects, forms and images, and I try to reveal what things are in themselves, their inner essence, and bring this feeling or sensation to the surface level of perception and experience. My process pivots around the logic, materiality, and methodology of assemblage, wherein multiple objects and forms are conjoined creating dynamic hybrids. I endeavour to communicate new possibilities of meaning by detaching things from their original context, exposing the material condition of things, and questioning the social production of forms and images within this particular cultural milieu.

Paul Yore, FUCK ME DEAD, 2022, mixed media assemblage comprising funeral hearse, found objects, glass, shells, LED lights, acrylic paint and plastic flooring. dimensions 592.5 x 379 x 149cm. Courtesy the artist and STATION (Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney). Originally commissioned by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art for the survey exhibition WORD MADE FLESH, 2022.

 

The car in this work is listed as a found material. How did you source it and why was it chosen? What initially drove you to this idea? 

Found materials are a way to dialogue with world in a very immediate and direct manner. I am attracted to things that circulate widely and yet seem underexamined or overlooked. Consequently, the source of my artworks is often obsolescence and waste. As a child I was already an avid collector of things – I was drawn to coins, gemstones, seashells, feathers, fossils, and other trinkets. I have always felt there is a hidden reality behind surface appearance, and that the contemplation of objects can bring us into proximity with other times and places. In this regard, the car could be read as an allegory for the transportative potentiality of art. The automobile is recurrently associated with modernity, progress, momentum, mobility and individual freedom, and these are ideas that speak loudly to the project of art.

Can you expand on the car as a symbol of Australiana, traditional masculinity and death? 

Art takes place in the mind of the viewer, and I am most interested in what someone feels when they experience art and encounter its multiple possibilities. I see the work as a conduit for collective memory and unconscious associations, allowing a plurality of available interpretations to surface. I ensure my pieces are very open and speculative by setting up polarities within the work, holding seemingly paradoxical concepts in proximity. For example, the car may evoke an optimistic by-gone era of Australian automotive manufacturing or conversely may conjure up images of industrial decay and entropy. The piece may exude a phallic energy, but one underscored by a distinct femininity. Likewise, this sculpture undoubtable confronts death as an inevitable aspect of the human condition, but this only reasserts the primacy of existence, the here and now of life itself. All these potential readings are animated by their opposing or contradictory impressions and held in a dialectical tension.

You have previously spoken about influences from David McDiarmid’s quilts and religious iconography from the Byzantine period. Can you expand on these influences and why it is that you incorporate the mosaic in your work as a means of transformation? 

I admire the manner with which McDiarmid used reflective materials to play with light and produce compelling works of great pathos and profundity. The exquisite icons of the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox tradition similarly used glass, gold, and precious stones to imbue images with a sense of transcendental luminosity. In a contemporary setting, information is illuminated through electric signage and the brightly lit screens of television and digital media, and so light remains a captivating device for the transmission of visual information. Correspondingly, I use light to imbue my work with a sense of immediacy and urgency, to heighten its semiotic potency. The fragmentary surfaces of my works in mosaic are inlaid with thousands of hand-cut pieces of glass, plastic and shell, refracting light in multiple directions simultaneously. I consider reflection in both its meanings: as outward shininess but also in relation to inward contemplative thought. The word mosaic also seems to carry this dual connotation, etymologically relating to both decoration and the idea of the muse.

Paul Yore, Sydney Opera House (You Make Me Feel), 2024, mixed media assemblage on board comprising glass, crockery, Perspex, beads, glitter, found objects, synthetic fur, trim, ribbon, cotton thread, LED light, wood, adhesive, fixtures, synthetic polymer, enamel 173cm x 165cm x 12cm. Courtesy of the artist and STATION (Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney).

 

Your large-scale works are often highly detailed, containing small fragments of collaged ideas, symbols and text. What is the significance of scale in your practice? How do you approach moving between macro and micro in your work? 

The interplay between the macro and the micro scale in the work is a strategy for increasing audience receptivity, creating multiple access points for the viewer to enter into a dialogue with the work. Meticulous attention to detail facilitates this deeper engagement with the work and enables a temporal shift – time seems to slow down as the viewer gets lost in all the intricacies of a composition. In everyday experience, we perceive things as neatly delineated objects, but on closer inspection we see the constituent parts of things or notice that the separation between individual entities is somewhat illusory or unclear. I am interested in the gap between the way reality seems to be (an expanded field of energy and matter in constant flux) and the way it is framed and represented by social and linguistic conventions (a linear series of relatively fixed and stable structures and categories). In my art, I am always trying to locate and exaggerate these internal contradictions between appearance and actuality.

What can we expect to see at your solo presentation with STATION at Melbourne Art Fair? 

I am excited to finally be unveiling a new series entitled Souvenir that has been in development for the past two years. The presentation is a study in folkloric images and forms, seeking beauty and mystery in the familiar. Deploying assemblage, mosaic, appliqué and embroidery, this new body of work extends my interest in the revival and adaptation of traditional decorative craft methodologies, artisanal techniques and vernacular forms. Engaging memory, nostalgia, and collective experience, my new pieces reimagine overlooked cultural symbols, transforming clichéd and naïve icons into monumental and mythic tableaux imbued with sincerity and gravity.

Paul Yore in studio. Photo: Devon Ackermann. Courtesy the artist and STATION (Naarm/Melbourne, Gadigal Country/Sydney).

FUCK ME DEAD will be exhibited in the heart of the Fair as part of BEYOND.  STATION will also present a solo show of Paul’s works within the Fair, Booth K5.
Click here to secure tickets to Melbourne Art Fair this February.