Painting in Three Dimensions: A New Chapter for Louise Forthun
Image credit: Louise Forthun, Flamenco, 2025, bronze. Courtesy of the artist and Charles Nodrum Gallery, Naarm / Melbourne
For over three decades, Louise Forthun has mapped the modern city through layers of stencil and precision. However, in her new show, Sculpture · Painting,she presents new works that show the diversity of her practice and move away from her highly detailed depictions of concrete jungles. At first, they appear quite different: dominant forms, bold strokes, single masses of bronze; however, they conceal threads that have been present in Forthun’s work since she began.
It wasn’t until the pandemic that Forthun was able to explore new ways of creation. She was fresh from spray-painting classes when the lockdowns hit, and luckily, she was within reach of her studio, allowing her to create. Unmarred by the deadlines of new shows, appointments or the pulls of everyday life and expectations, Forthun investigated, thrilled by the opportunities; “it ended up just being more about the process of construction than having nice surprises and trying new things.” While the serendipitous nature of creating with scrunches of paper cast in bronze, and large gestures of abstractive paintings, the historical thread of Forthun’s works, in her explorations of texture and colour, provides a backdrop for these results.
The texture in Forthun’s work reflects the tactility of the process, much as her earlier work reflected the precision and thought, but this new process offers a more hands-on approach. She describes it as ‘exciting and physical because before that, I was making very detailed stencils, like aerial views of cities, and it'll be this very long, drawn-out process where they would have to find the image. It'd have to be the right megabytes. It was very difficult to print, and then I'd spend like up to a year cutting it all out with a scalpel.’ These aerial views are still found in the new works, but they reflect mountain ranges more so than the urban scenes. The sculptures, scrunched papers in bronze, stand like monoliths, their colours breathing new life into the textures they reveal. Light plays its part in this process, as do the shadows which move along the contours of the paper, and colours seemingly change throughout the day.
Image credit: Louise Forthun, Sculpture · Painting, Installation view, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Naarm / Melbourne, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
After working with paper in stencilling, Forthun has always seen the potential of the medium, but it had never been the forefront of the work until now. “I've just always loved all different things about Japan. So when I was there, I was doing a lot of ink, drawings and things, and then I came back and I did this advanced spray painting course, even though I've been spray painting for 30 years, I always felt like I wasn't doing it properly.” Through the revision of the path well-trodden, the way forward seems clear. That sense of doubt that prodded Forthun to revisit spray painting also made her look at the papers that she cut stencils from; it made her see the colours shift in light and their influence on depth, bringing more earthy tones to her sculptures. In this way, her work has always been pulling her toward the abstract; it was just a matter of time. “My paintings were very sheer in the past and more like a deep space going within. I was always interested in this sort of abstraction as well, but never knew how to do it.” It’s been there all along, but its summation of her works has evolved to Sculpture · Painting, and it shall surely have more evolutions.
The medium itself transgresses over, the exhibition may be called Sculpture · Painting, but the artist has trouble reconciling with it. She reflected, “I never would have thought in a million years that I'd be making sculptures, and I don't even think of them as sculptures… they're like little paintings”. When the paintings, both in sculptural form and those on the walls, are seen together, the logic becomes clear. In trying to break from her normal practice, to try new things, Forthun continues the investigations she had been trying to be released from.
Perhaps, Forthun will never escape the process in her practice. Doing, creating, making, and exploring will always be at the core of it. It is what makes us human after all.
Image credit: Louise Forthun, Poem (detail), 2025, acrylic on canvas. Louise Forthun, Blossoms (detail), 2025, acrylic on canvas. Courtesy of the artist and Charles Nodrum Gallery, Naarm / Melbourne
Louise Forthun’s Sculpture · Painting is on at Charles Nodrum Gallery, Naarm / Melbourne until 8 November 2025.
