George Criddle (born. 1984) is a British-Australian artist, writer, and occasional curator currently teaching at RMIT University and the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. They completed a PhD in 2021 at Monash University and have previously studied at Curtin University in Perth and École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Since 2005 George has been part of international exhibitions and residencies in Kassel, Zurich, Paris and Prague as well as exhibitions in Melbourne at The Living Museum of the West, MADA faculty Gallery, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, and artist-run spaces such as Kings, West Space, Blindside, Slopes gallery and TCB gallery. They are currently on the board of KINGS Artist Run Gallery as Co-ordinator of the Emerging Writers Program with Beatrice Rubio-Gabriel.
From my perspective Georgina Criddle’s Loading project begins with an image on her mobile phone, which she showed me, of a small cube of sawdust on the floor of her studio. I admired the low fi character of the sculpture and wanted to know more. This artwork was Untitled (Sawdust Cube), made last year and just over 30 centimetres cubed. Criddle had sanded the wooden studio floor and arranged the collected sander dust in a cube. Layers of different colours looked like stratification in sedimentary rock.
The layer towards the top appeared darker and I thought about a kind of greasy layer of accumulated detritus on floorboards. I associated it with the peculiar pleasure I get from emptying the vacuum cleaner seeing all the grime hang together. I was mistaken, in fact, to think that there was a layer of grime even though it was the something I liked about the work, funnily enough. Really, Criddle had painted the floor with blackboard paint, spilt chalk powder and hired a floor sander to remove it.
I was impressed at how the gathered dust stood up. Criddle had made special paddle devices to achieve that shape. I remember thinking of the big hydraulic presses that are used to squash cars into cubes. I also thought of all the cubes in modern art—there are so many. The thing that comes to mind about these cubes is how there seems to be a bundle of theories that subsume the work. I’m talking about Minimalism and its theories. Perhaps it is a question of dualism—the difference between materials and ideas in art. Criddle talks about Robert Smithson sometimes. Am I right to understand that like Smithson she is interested in breaking down the binaries of inside and outside? But because Loading seems to be embedded in a story, there might be something more to it. It is as if cartography, Smithson’s conceptual terrain, has been replaced by chronology.
But then the artist stepped backwards and accidentally ruined this sculpture. I went to her studio to see it only once it had been ruined. Two third of the sculpture remained in formation, though looking a bit wonky, and the other third spread across the floor. Criddle gave it a different title Untitled (sawdust removed from studio floor, packed into a stratified cube and eventually tripped over). She told me later that she was distraught by the accident. I always thought it happened by design because all the references to modern cubes dropped away and this artwork appeared just as itself. My experience of the artwork unfolds through incidents, like this accident, but differently form the chronological order of events. It took me a while to understand the process. I was thinking too conventionally. I didn’t grasp how important narrative is at first.
There is also a type of site specificity to this work. It was made from a material derived from the studio. It was displayed in the studio. The floor was on the floor. Thought even though the material maintains an immediate proximity to its origin its relationship has changed. It is almost like the material of Untitled (sawdust removed from studio floor, packed into a stratified cube and eventually tripped over) is a secondary product of the narrative. I mean sander dust is typically a by-product of woodwork. But the problem of seeing Loading this way is that it constrains it to a tedious type of site specificity—the type that is symbolic of a site’s heritage. This approach is far too literal.
My interpretation includes language that displaces and elides the work, naturally. But here, I think, I should avoid cleaning up this messy encounter. Isn’t the sanding dust packed away in a plastic bag now?
Tim Alves, 2014