Augusta Vinall Richardson
Temporary Configurations

Temporary Configurations is a major new body of work by Augusta Vinall Richardson that examines the tensions between temporariness, permanence, autonomy and support. For the artist, these concerns are inseparable from both material and social conditions, operating within a socio-material field in which objects, bodies, and relations are entangled, propped up, sustained and understood through one another.

The exhibition presents sculptures in corten steel, bronze and stainless steel alongside wall-mounted works made of cardboard, rags, lunch bags, and glue. Once functioning as maquettes or templates for metal sculptures, these ‘temporary’ constructions are re-positioned here as fully resolved works, engaging with Celine Condorelli’s concept of the ‘fantasy of the object as freestanding’. [1] In a similar vein, the sculptural logic underpinning Temporary Configurations situates the provisional and the permanent in lateral dialogue, foregrounding support as both a legitimate subject and a necessary material condition, rather than something that ought to be concealed or withdrawn.

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