Isadora Vaughan's practice is synonymous with a certain style of sculpture and installation that has emerged over the past decade amongst a new generation of (usually VCA-trained) Melbourne-based artists. It is a style that emphasises materiality, indeterminacy and contingency, and generally promotes an aesthetic of scum, grunge and clutter. This style is palpable in the 'messy', organic layout of Recalcitrant Bodies, with its focus on formlessness, on inchoate and ad hoc materials, and its self-conscious eschewal of signs of traditional artistic 'skills'.
The room sheet to the exhibition describes Recalcitrant Bodies as a sculptural manifestation of an 'imagined body's interior': 'if the floor is the flesh, these armatures are the bones, and the rest is the fat and the organs and the swarms of information that talk and travel, atmospherically between, breathing in, breathing out. Inside is another landscape.'
It is this metaphor of an 'inside'—the 'great indoors' of an unspecified body, be it organic, architectural, social or otherwise—that begs further elucidation and analysis. What is this 'inside' and how is it illuminated by Recalcitrant Bodies?