Nadia Odlum – All Possible Combinations
‘All possible combinations’ was commissioned by Kaldor Public Art Projects for the Kaldor Studio, a dedicated education and learning space in the major retrospective exhibition Making art public: 50 years of Kaldor Public Art Projects at the Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney.
Featuring an interactive explosion of colours and shapes, this work drew inspiration from the work of conceptual artist Sol LeWitt’s two Kaldor Public Art Projects, staged in Australia in 1977 and 1998. ‘All possible combinations’ contained one hundred large wooden blocks in six vibrant colours, moveable angled mirrors and a spatially disruptive black line. Audiences were invited to reconfigure the work, engaging in a puzzle with endless solutions. Over the course of one month hundreds of visitors played with the blocks to create new colourful shapes and patterns.
Following the completion of this project Odlum undertook a one month residency at the Megalo Print Studio in Canberra. Here she used documentation of patterns created by visitors to ‘All Possible Combinations’ as the inspiration for a series of screen prints. These works added a new dimension to this audience-artist collaboration, as Odlum experimented with screen printing processes to create new colours and overlays.
