Artist Paul Yore Explains the Five Rooms Inside His Grand New, Career-Spanning Exhibition

“It's very big exhibition,” says Melbourne artist Paul Yore of Word Made Flesh, his new exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. “Definitely the biggest I've been involved in constructing.”

For Yore, that’s saying something. Over the past 15 years Yore’s work has become instantly identifiable. Often consisting of large-scale, collage-like pieces of garish, kitschy, day-glo imagery, Yore’s work hinges on the dissonant clash of micro and macro, playful and confronting.

“I like to make the work wondrous and whimsical, but then there’s this nauseating element,” he says. “It’s teetering on the edge of sickly sweet.”

Yore’s work often deals with themes such as sexuality, homophobia, consumerism, late capitalism and celebrity worship, refracted through the lens of his queer identity. Yore says his work has always been wilfully exploratory in nature. “I've always seen my work as quite intuitive and organic, and heavily driven by experimentation,” he says. “I’m always interested in new forms, in pushing boundaries and in trying new things and materials. My work is always changing and trying to respond to the cultural mood.”

World Made Flesh weaves together multiple threads of Yore’s identity over five rooms featuring hundreds of works. Its title a riff on the dissonance at the heart of his work. “The title is borrowed from the bible and reflects my upbringing as a Catholic. But it’s also a way of reclaiming some of the imagery and symbology of Christianity as a queer artist.”

It’s these experimental works – of which there are hundreds – which will be on display at ACCA.

Inside the exhibition, audiences can expect to be guided through five purpose-designed spaces. However, instead of being structured chronologically, they’ve been thematized.

Room one: Signs
Splashed in resplendent yellow, the opening room features works created by Yore over the past decade which all have a linguistic element. “The first room is structured around the idea of language, which plays a very important part in my work,” says Yore. “I’m very interested in the way language proliferates in our culture, in the 24-hour news cycle, and in political sloganeering. And so this room is full of very delicate, small-scale needlepoint works – almost referring back to Victorian era [needlework] samplers and their delicate embroidered works.”

Room two: Embodiment
Painted a fleshy pink, the second room in Word Made Flesh is organised around the idea of the human vessel. “It’s structured around the idea of body and has larger-scale quilted works constructed from found materials,” says Yore. These quilted works – which take the form of ‘blankets’ – hang in two tiers across all four walls.

To create these works Yore uses materials found in op-shops, such as clothing, bedding and blankets. “They’re really interesting materials because they have a relationship to peoples’ lives,” says Yore. “They usually have traces of pet hair or stains from their use. [But I’m] interested in the idea that textiles relate very much to the body and peoples’ lived experiences.”

Room three: Manifesto
Surrounded by pen drawings, preparatory sketches, texts, watercolours and collage works, four large triangular textile pendants hang suspended from the ceiling inside the Manifesto room.

“The third room is based around the idea of the art object as being a political object out in the world,” says Yore. Painted red to signify art’s radical potential, Yore says the room’s, “large-scale, textual works reference political banners you’d find in the streets.”

This inspiration comes from his involvement in the anti-war protests during the US invasion of Iraq. “I became interested in the ways in which very large banners are made, and the idea of urgency and making something very quickly then taking it out in the street,” says Yore. “This room explores that.”

Room four: The Horizon
Painted an ecclesiastical purple, the fourth room features works that incorporate playful materials to challenge the grandiose historicism of European colonialism. “[The] very large, panoramic, landscape-style quilts look at this idea of the horizon,” says Yore. “The idea of the future, and also the idea of Australia in a colonial context.”

Room five: Word Made Flesh
The fifth and final room contains the titular giant Word Made Flesh, a newly commissioned gesamtkunstwerk (a German term meaning ‘total work of art’) which has been anarchically composed from prefabricated temporary structures. Yore describes the assemblage as: “a colourful and cacophonous installation comprising of literally thousands of materials, lights, fountains, mechanised kinetic structures, architectural structures and video work.”

Given the exhibition encompasses a wide range of unconventional works and materials, some audiences may not know what to expect before visiting. Despite this, there is one thing Yore asks visitors to Word Made Flesh arrive armed with curiosity. “As a queer artist, what I’m putting out there is something I don’t necessarily see represented in the mainstream,” he says. “So I always hope audiences come to that with a sort of empathy or generosity of spirit to actually engage with something they might not be necessarily as familiar with or comfortable with.”

Paul Yore: Word Made Flesh is on display in the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Friday September 23 – Sunday November 20, 2022. Entry is free.

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