Georgia Saxelby
Portrait of Georgia Saxelby. Courtesy of the artist
Tell us how you became you?
I was 19 traveling through Nepal, on the precipice of beginning a law degree, when I had a passing encounter with a traveling artist. Observing the jealousy I felt was extremely telling. It was the kind that isn’t about ego but more about deep, thick yearning. I enrolled in art school the next day.
What was your awakening moment in art?
It was a teacher at the National Art School in Sydney, Roger Crawford, who has become a beloved mentor and friend, who helped me understand what art can be: a relationship to build that can become a great love of one’s life. He treated art making as an extremely serious pursuit. His love of art, of the intimacy and capacity and grandness of it, was contagious. Mark by mark on the canvas, he taught me how to see.
Lullaby, Photograph by Kristin Adair. Image courtesy of the artist
What inspires you most?
Flowers. Most days, or as often as possible, I take a neighborhood stroll with no fixed destination and I look at the flowers. I notice a velvety deep plum hue and how the pigment appears to become denser, richer at the bottom of its bell shape. I spend time staring at the light shining through a satiny buttermilk yellow petal, or the orange fuzz that covers an electric green trumpet-shaped flower creating an optical shimmering. I find color intoxicating, I want to drink it with my eyes. This kind of slow looking fills up my creative well. I love rock pools for the same reason.
Propositions for Architectural Ornaments. Photographed by Shan Turner-Carroll, Kate Warren, Gregory Stanley. Image courtesy of the artist
Can you tell us about your daily routine, do you have any rituals you live by?
Other than the daily color foraging walks in the early evenings, I try to do Morning Pages most mornings. From Julia Cameron’s revered book The Artist’s Way, Morning Pages are 3 pages of handwritten stream of consciousness writing prescribed daily after waking. It’s designed to get the noise out of your mind and externalized on paper, as well as to gleam treasures you didn’t know were up there. It has a cumulative effect - the more you do it, the more grounding and treasure-filled it becomes.
Lullaby. Photograph by Kristin Adair. Image courtesy of the artist
What does FORM mean to you as an artist?
Forms, like rules, are made to be broken, melted, composted, and purged. As a multidisciplinary artist, form could mean the arrangement of objects in a particular way in space that leads the audience into a set of actions: the shape of a ritual space. It could mean a historical form, like an architectural facade, that has an aesthetic lineage I’m trying to turn on its head, parody, or extend. It could mean the compositional structure beneath a moving image or sculpture, like a skeleton to the skin.
My works often involve some kind of a container with edges that is then exploded through a performance or activation, whether it's a fire that engulfs the hard edges of a witch’s house or a glass sculpture that becomes a ghostly larger-than-life phantom through its refracted image. I create forms that I rebel against.
Lullaby. Photograph by Kristin Adair, Image courtesy of the artist.
Can you tell us about Magic Hour?
My latest body of work, Magic Hour, is a series of glass sculptures that refract video projections across the museum space. The glass objects reflect and rupture the moving images into mirage-like apparitions that crawl across the walls, flicker through apertures, and blur in and out of focus. Like a magic mirror or crystal ball, these sculptures have both a material life and an immaterial life, transforming the museum into a psychological space that the audience navigate.
Magic House. Photograph byTom Little. Image courtesy of the artist
Can you talk about To Future Women, which was in 2018, how do you feel now in 2025?
To Future Women is a 20 year time capsule of letters written by the public to the next generation of women to memorialize the 2017 Women’s Marches and #MeToo movements. It moved between national museums in Washington, D.C., including the Hirshhorn Museum, The Phillips Collection, and the Smithsonian Arts & Industries Building, collecting letters in person and via the museums’ mailing systems. Over 3000 letters in 10 different languages were collected, including from Hillary Clinton, Jill Biden, three generations of one family, a kindergarten class, and an incarcerated man. The time capsule is currently being cared for by The Phillips Collection until 2037, when it will be opened and re-exhibited on the 20th anniversary of the 2017 Women’s March.
In terms of how I feel now, I don’t think I fully realized how bad it could become. The extent of the erasure of reproductive rights, trans rights, and values of diversity and inclusion is shocking. I’m reminded that human rights progress is not linear and can be taken away in a flash. I’m also reminded of the lineage of women who have doggedly resisted patriarchal oppression since the development of patriarchal capitalism in medieval Europe and its colonies. I’m just as determined as ever to add to that lineage.
To Future Women. Photographed by Kate Warren, Joe Gibson. Image coutesy of the artist
What does crafting radical space look like in 2025?
Radical spaces aren’t static or singular. They shapeshift, they are polyvocal and multi perspectival. They are spaces that don’t conform to permanent, hierarchical or rational logics. These kinds of spaces are powerful and dangerous to structures of power because they can’t be controlled. Radical spaces are uncontrollable spaces.
What has been your biggest challenge?
The desire to do everything all at once. I’m medium agnostic - I change artistic mediums depending on the idea driving a body of work. This means I’m always working outside of my comfort zone, which gives me an artistic freedom and ability to take risks beyond my training as a painter. I’m juggling several balls at once, but I’m addicted to the unexpected outcomes that result.
The Architecture of a Witch's Hut. Photo: Subodh SamudreI, Image courtesy of the artist.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
The piece of advice that comes to mind is from Roger, my art school mentor, who once told me: don’t paint the fire, paint the smoke billowing from it. Paint its warmth on your cheeks.
What motto do you live by?
Turn things inside out and upside down.
GEORGIA SAXELBY is featured in FORM vol.I.
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