.jpg)
The late 1970s and 1980s were a heady time for design. Postmodernism was king and functionality took a back seat to aggressive aesthetic playfulness, exuberance and deconstructed hierarchies of taste and tradition. The particularly boisterous flavour of postmodern design pioneered by the Memphis Group in Milan has even recently made a cartoonish comeback in commercial branding and graphic design in the so-called Neo-Memphis style.
When you look at the work of Tāmaki Makaurau-based artist Jack Hadley, you can see definite references to the Memphis Group and the related Studio Alchimia. Some pieces are comparable to the art of Jean Dubuffet and Cobra, others are crudely industrial in their “what you see is what you see” simplicity – but not minimal, no, never that. In fact, it feels vulgar to try to pick out individual influences, or even to impose distinctions like “art” or “design” on such rich fabulousness. This is, however, no mere nostalgia trip or recherché art-historical exercise. It’s more a playful deconstruction of playful deconstruction, but with more hope and less irony.
“Yeah,” says Hadley. “There’s an optimism and a gleeful use of ornamentation in design practices from this moment that I’m really interested in. You can trace a direct link between my use of colour, form and industrial materials to the 1970s and the work of people like Ettore Sottsass Jr and Richard Rogers.” This emerges from Hadley’s interest in the possibilities of layering disparate references, and the confusion of form and function that these practices explored. “I’d like some of the playfulness and possibility of design from this period to be evident in my own work,” says Hadley, “but I hope that I largely avoid nostalgia and irony. I’m not interested in looking backward, but in the world around me.”
The key thing that informs the work is thinking about how things around the artist are made – contemporary materials, processes, and the logic of production. “I’m constantly excited by new technologies and possibilities,” he says. “At the moment, I’m obsessed with designing and making custom circuit boards. I’ve been turning these circuit boards into brooches and presenting them as contemporary jewellery, with flashing coloured LEDs taking the traditional place of gemstones.”
Hadley’s work has an interesting relationship with industry. Last year he inveigled his way into the EMEX manufacturing and engineering trade fair, the biggest such even in Aotearoa. “I invented JBH MFG, a rapid-prototyping company, and pretended to be the managing director to get an event pass,” says the artist. “This was the starting point for Signals! Solutions!, an exhibition I presented at Laree Payne Gallery in Kirikiriroa.”
Certainly the furniture and décor pieces have a functionality to them, utilitarian sculpture, and there was a collaboration with fashion designer Emma Jing on a range of one-off hand-painted garments. In 2021 Hadley was mentored by Karl Fritsch as part of the Handshake contemporary jewellery programme. “Working with Emma and Karl is great,” says Hadley. “There’s a wonderful pace and frenzy to the projects I have worked on with them. They both love making stuff, and it’s great to be able to bounce off this enthusiasm. When working with them, you don’t overthink things – you do it and see what happens. I take more risks and work more quickly and roughly than I typically would.”
Some of the work is definitely sculpture, but references design. Yet other works, like the aluminium wall panels studded with cubic zirconia, are surely art pour l’art. But where do the more utilitarian pieces sit in the space between art and design? It’s not something the artist worries about. “For me,” he says, “everything I make is part of the same jumble of ideas and objects. When I make functional objects, I approach them with the same set of concerns that inform my broader practice. Unlike a traditional furniture designer, I’m not especially interested in ergonomics or functional practicalities. Instead, when making these works, my decision-making is driven by questions like how to emphasise the joint between two different materials, or because I get really excited by the satin-like quality the edge of a waterjet-cut aluminium part has.”
.jpg)
.jpg)
Some elements of his innovative oeuvre defy categorisation, such as the jolly kinetic sculptures that showed in Round Round at Objectspace in 2022, dancing like a shop display by Len Lye. Indeed, quirky displays and posable mannequins are touchstones of Hadley’s practice in the space between art and fashion. “The link to mannequins and display structures in my practice dates back to art school,” he says, “when two friends and I made work under the guise of a fashion label. We improvised clothes from shower curtains, basketballs, and liquid nails, using rough blocks of industrial polystyrene as display forms. This interest in mannequin-like forms has continued because I like working in the tradition of figurative sculpture. It’s a default sculptural format, which means there’s plenty of opportunity to play with and push against its expectations.
“When making Round Round,” says Hadley, “I was thinking about fly-fishing lures, reflective bird-repellent devices, and the wobbly inflatable men outside car yards. These references definitely have an element of the surreal and absurd. The premise of Round Round was a sloppy joke. To accompany the Aotearoa Jewellery Triennial in 2022, Objectspace invited me to be part of a rotating display of contemporary jewellery practices. I decided to take the idea of a ‘rotating display’ literally, making three motorised sculptures that spun jewellery-like objects in circles.”
The Dadaists and surrealists of the early 20th century would have understood it immediately, as they would Hadley’s fascination with fashion. Giorgio de Chirico and Salvador Dalí referenced mannequins a lot in their art, and Dalí had a symbiotic relationship with fashion, resulting in some fantastic window displays for the Bonwit Teller department store in New York. Likewise Paris designer Elsa Schiaparelli brought surrealism into fashion. There is a similar spirit at play in Hadley’s work.
“There’s a lot I find interesting about fashion,” he says, “its use of materials, layering of references, and the performative possibilities of fashion shows. I’d love to explore working within this format more. When I work in this way, it does not feel like there’s a distinction from my practice more broadly that needs to be navigated; it’s just an extension of what I’m already interested in and doing. Recently, I’ve been thinking about making an aluminium handbag based on the crappy plastic peg basket my parents have on their washing line. I don’t know if I’ll actually make it. Thinking about this idea is more of a way of procrastinating from what I should be working on.”
Hadley is currently working on a series of furniture pieces that Laree Payne Gallery will present at the upcoming Aotearoa Art Fair in Tāmaki Makaurau. “These works,” he says, “are assembled from a set of custom aluminium components and joints that I’ve designed. The parts will be combined in different ways and colour variations to create a series of one-off furniture pieces. This series continues the heavy-duty, industrial design language I’ve recently been working with, but I’ve also been playing with confusing this by introducing more baroque references and decorative forms.”
Related Stories:
