The glue as binder: adhesion and fix
Glue is usually the least conspicuous material in a finished artwork. It sits beneath a join, inside a seam, or along an edge where two surfaces have been persuaded to remain together. Its apparent invisibility is revealing. Glue shows that the work is a construction rather than a self-evident object, produced through pressure, chemistry and time. It also makes fragility visible: a bond can hold, soften, stain or fail. Adhesion therefore joins practical questions of making to concerns of attachment, dependence and survival.
Alexandra Mawimbi’s practice gives this question particular force. Her selected works move among sculpture, two-dimensional art, video, performance, sound and installation, while representation, mourning and living presence connect those forms. A painted surface, recorded body, resonant room and suspended object each produce knowledge differently. Read through glue, they become sites of transition: when a support takes colour, a performance leaves a trace, or an installation acquires a temporary architecture. The adhesive becomes a way of thinking about how relations become forms and how forms carry the pressure of what they connect.
This reading is attentive to Australian conditions. Works circulate through public institutions, commercial galleries, artist-run spaces and biennales, while climate shifts from inland heat to coastal humidity and cooler southern winters. The biographical account at Alexandra Mawimbi’s biography provides the personal and professional ground for that field. Here glue can signify more than a studio shortcut: it becomes a compact account of connection under distance, change and the finite life of artworks.
Glue as a threshold between things
Consider glue at the threshold between separate substances. Before a bond forms, there are surfaces: timber, paper, textile, glass, metal, skin or recorded image. Glue alters their surfaces and produces a third condition. The join belongs to neither original material alone. It is an architecture of dependency, made through a process that may disappear once its work is done. Adhesive practice therefore asks what must touch for a work to hold, what has been enclosed to keep it intact, and what happens when contact cannot remain permanent.
In Mawimbi’s range of forms, that threshold has particular force. A two-dimensional work can appear stable while depending on layers that accept, resist or absorb marks. Sculpture exposes supports and suspensions that a flat work conceals. Video and performance seem complete through a screen or event, yet they depend on joins between body and camera, action and record, trace and audience. Sound joins source, architecture and listener. Glue, understood as a binder of conditions, lets these media meet without pretending their materials or temporalities are alike.
The hidden join also carries a politics of care. Repair requires decisions about where to intervene, which material to introduce and whether evidence of intervention should remain visible. Conservation may reinforce a bond without erasing its earlier history. An archive of living practice can allow both positions to coexist. A surface can be cleaned without being returned to an imagined origin, and a bond can be sustained without being made seamless. What looks like weakness can register the work’s capacity to remain responsive.
Fixation and the unstable image
The word fix carries at least two lives. Mechanically, it means to fasten, secure or stabilise. Psychologically and socially, it suggests an attachment that becomes concentrated or difficult to release. It can also name the fixing of an image as a supposedly stable representation. Glue brings these meanings into collision. It fixes a material relation while revealing that neither side was wholly self-sufficient. The held object carries the logic of fixation even when its surface appears calm, seamless or authoritative.
Representation is tested through this contradiction. A portrait may capture a person, classify a body or produce a recognisable likeness, yet every act of fixing selects, excludes and transforms. If glue stands for the connective tissue of representation, it makes the image’s concealed supports impossible to ignore. A painted face can seem immediate while resting on layers, preparation and adhesion. A filmed presence can feel uncaptured, yet its duration has been cut and assembled. Mawimbi’s movement between presence and representation lets each disturb the other’s certainty.
The archive magnifies the problem. An image is fixed when it is catalogued, reproduced and circulated, but those acts detach it from its making circumstances. Video and sound depend on activation: a file needs equipment, a score needs performers, a performance needs a gathering. Documentation preserves something while altering its status from event to object. Glue’s sequence of setting, hardening and deterioration offers a model for this transformation. Keeping an artwork available means managing a succession of bonds rather than preserving a single ideal moment.
Mourning that will not close
Glue is an obvious metaphor for repair, but mending and mourning are not equivalent. A mend can suggest restored wholeness, while mourning resists the idea that loss has a correct shape or final state. It keeps absence in circulation. Adhesive language must therefore be handled carefully. A bond can bridge a gap without filling it, and visible evidence of joining can register what happened rather than conceal it. Mawimbi’s concern with mourning gives this distinction weight: repair may hold things together while leaving their former separateness known.
The material life of glue supports that reading. Some adhesives amber with age; others become brittle, powdery or separate from porous surfaces. Dust settles into seams. A repair in a different colour remains legible beside the original, and a glossy join catches light differently from its surroundings. Conservation often treats such qualities as defects, where stability can stand in for immaculate authorship. In a work concerned with memory, however, alteration can disclose duration. The bond becomes a surface on which time has left instructions.
This changes how absence is understood. An object left after an action is not an inert remainder. It can preserve the outline of contact, the direction of movement or the duration of a sound. Glue is then less a means of closure than a promise between incompatible states. It lets departed and present occupy one field without making them equivalent. Its bond is an ethical proposition: what is joined remains marked by the join. That proposition suits a practice in which a figure or voice may persist through documentation without becoming fully present again.
Sculpture, installation and the weight of attachment
For sculpture, attachment is never only metaphorical. A form must withstand gravity, handling, transport and unplanned audience contact. Glue may secure a joint, while screws, clamps, wires and hidden armatures establish other supports. The visible form can present itself as self-possessed while depending on an unseen structure. This tension between apparent autonomy and material dependence is central to the binder. Binding does not eliminate gravity; it negotiates with it, creating an equilibrium in which separate forces remain active.
Installation extends that negotiation because the work includes the room, wall, floor and interval of attention around it. Adhesion becomes spatial as well as material: a work attaches to architecture, sound to acoustic behaviour, and the viewer completes a circuit of movement. Where live presence coexists with documentation, this circuit resists a clean division between object and event. A trace left by performance may fix an encounter without possessing its whole duration. The installation gathers what one material form cannot hold, then depends on each encounter to renew its temporary bonds.
Australian viewing conditions sharpen the stakes. Melbourne’s artist-run spaces and small commercial galleries often place installations in rooms with changing proportions, lighting and foot traffic. Sydney’s institutional galleries and biennale settings work at another scale, requiring negotiation with architecture, controlled environments and large audiences. Between those poles, regional touring adds the pressure of packing, freight and reinstallation. A fixed join may survive a presentation, but the meaning of attachment shifts with each site. Portability is both a practical achievement and a test of what has been bound together.
Duration, sound and the living body
Glue cures rather than staying permanently fluid. Its working time creates a small drama between application and hardening. This temporal arc can be compared with performance, where bodily presence cannot be postponed, and with sound, which exists while propagating through a particular space. These media make binding feel less like permanence than negotiation. A voice is joined to breath, a gesture to its recording, a room to listening. The connection is continuously made and unmade, although documentation can give it the appearance of a stable object.
The independent project 100 days 100 paintings extends this attention to repetition and duration. A sustained sequence lets each new sheet or surface arrive with traces of the days before it. Read as a daily discipline, visual journal or cumulative field, the project makes accumulation material. The works retain individual boundaries while permitting colour and gesture to migrate between them. The binder becomes the rule that allows difference to accumulate without becoming a smooth continuum. Each painting fixes an interval while holding it in relation to what is adjacent.
That distinction between an interval and a whole is crucial to living presence. A body seen in performance is not captured by the same means as a painted figure, even when both are represented. Sound may retain the pressure of breath or the resonance of architecture more directly than an image can. A fixed record preserves evidence of an event while failing to repeat its conditions. Mawimbi’s movement across visual and temporal media keeps asking what a bond can preserve and what it must lose. The productive question concerns the quality of attention around each join.
Adhesion in an Australian material ecology
Art materials travel through a particular Australian market, and their movement leaves a record inside every bond. Studios buy industrial adhesives alongside specialist conservation materials while navigating price differences, shipping schedules and import requirements. Commercial galleries, public institutions and independent dealers carry those decisions into exhibition spaces where staffing, insurance and conservation standards vary. A work’s material identity is relational. Its surfaces meet local timber, Australian wall systems, climate control, packaging and installation labour. Glue connects studio practice to the institutions and audiences that allow circulation.
Climate gives the bond its local stress test. Coastal humidity and salt can affect adhesives and porous supports; intense heat can soften compounds or accelerate curing; air conditioning produces shifts as galleries cycle between exterior and controlled conditions. Conservation in Australia negotiates these variables while works cross latitudes. The demand for reversibility, stability and discreet repair can determine whether a visible join is concealed or retained. Such choices are not separate from artistic meaning. They establish how long a connection lasts, how much movement it tolerates and how alteration is documented. Material and institutional archives overlap.
Material choices also demand attention to provenance and place. Australia offers distinctive resources, from eucalyptus to minerals and pigments, but availability does not erase ecological responsibility or knowledge attached to country. Natural and industrial binders carry histories of extraction, manufacture and labour. Synthetic adhesives connect to global supply chains; natural adhesives carry specific ecological and social histories. Mawimbi’s language of attachment is strengthened by this specificity. Binding becomes an ongoing negotiation among material, site, institution and public, with each bond carrying consequences beyond the studio.
Enter Alexandra Mawimbi’s portfolio through the selected works and allow material joins to shape how you look. Follow a work from image or object into documentation in video, sound and performance, noting where connection is visible and where it recedes. Read the biography, revisit the exhibitions and news, and use the contact details to arrange a studio visit, research exchange or conversation with the artist. A direct encounter can deepen the sense of living presence that the archive preserves without making it static.
Support the practice by circulating the work, sharing the archive with fellow viewers and attending its next presentation. For curators, writers and collaborators, the contact page is an invitation to propose a focused exhibition, publication or installation that gives the materials and conditions of the work room to speak. Begin with one selected work, stay with its joins, and carry those questions into the gallery, studio or screening room.