Ahead of her exhibition Interior States, we spent an afternoon with the sculptor whose cast faces, held against real skin, have become a quiet obsession in South Yarra.
Chi Trinh makes second surfaces. She casts the human face in plaster and resin, then holds those fragile shells against real skin, until you are no longer sure which one is the mask. Her work is unsettling and tender at once, exactly the kind of thing we want on these walls, so when she agreed to show here it felt less like a booking and more like a homecoming.
“I’m interested in the moment a face becomes an object, and then a person again,” she tells us, turning a cast to the light. “We all wear a second surface. I just make mine so you can hold it.” Her practice moves between anatomy and identity, in plaster, resin and metal, and it has carried her work as far as the NGV.
Interior States gathers twelve new pieces alongside work from three emerging Melbourne sculptors, chosen, Chi says, because “they treat the body as a material, not just a subject.”
“There’s a warmth here you don’t get in a white cube. People sit down, they stay. On opening night I watched two strangers talk in front of one piece for an hour.” That, in a sentence, is the whole idea.
See the exhibition →