Augusta Vinall Richardson
Temporary Configurations

Temporary Configurations, Vinall Richardson’s first institutional solo exhibition, presents a major new body of work exploring themes of temporariness and permanence, proximity and support. For the artist, these concerns are epistemological and inherently social, carrying implications in sculptural practice: how objects – and by extension bodies, relations, structures, and worlds – are propped up, sustained, and understood.

The exhibition is anchored by newly commissioned sculptures in corten steel, stainless steel, and bronze, alongside wall-mounted works made from cardboard and glue. Once functioning as maquettes or templates for metal sculptures, these ostensibly ‘temporary’ cardboard constructions are presented here as fully resolved works. In dialogue with practices such as artist Céline Condorelli’s that have treated support as a critical category, Temporary Configurations questions modernist fantasies of autonomy, order and permanence. The sculptural logic of the exhibition foregrounds support as both a legitimate subject and a necessary material condition, rather than something that ought to be concealed or withdrawn. [1]

Augusta Vinall Richardson (b. 1991) lives and works in Naarm Melbourne. Vinall Richardson works with cardboard and metals to create abstract, modular sculptures that function both as independent objects and as structures of their own support. Neither fully autonomous nor entirely provisional, her works enact a paradoxical impetus toward monumentality and fragility, permanence and impermanence, troubling conventional understandings of sculptural independence and the built environment. Drawn, stenciled, cut, folded, cast, and welded by hand in her studio, Vinall Richardson’s sculptures engage with and resist increasingly mechanised, tech-driven modes of contemporary artistic production.

Vinall Richardson completed a Master of Fine Art at Monash University in 2022 and has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney Australia, La Trobe Art Institute, Djaara Bendigo, and the 2024 Melbourne Sculpture Biennial.

Commissioning curator: Brigid Moriarty

[1] See: Céline Condorelli, Support Structures, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009