Paper Parts
28 March – 19 April 2025

Logan Art Gallery
Project Space

Paper Parts explores the poetic potential of paper, emphasising its everyday materiality, performative possibilities, and relationship with text. Through weaving, cutting, printing, piercing, and stitching, Brisbane-based artist Ally McKay challenges the perception of paper as merely a surface, revealing its role as both medium and message.

McKay’s experimental approach investigates paper as both a site of action and material metaphor for both fragility and resilience. McKay also considers the functionality of mass-produced papers—such as list papers, system cards, and envelopes—examining how these familiar surfaces hold potential beyond their intended use.

Through subtle manipulations, she exposes the tension between utility and artistic expression, revealing new ways to read, interpret, and engage with materials. By employing weaving as a technique to reorder and disrupt the structure of printed words, McKay subtly critiques understandings of language and the printed word, challenging the authority and stability of text through material intervention.

By repurposing and reinterpreting the material and textual traces of daily life, Paper Parts encourages viewers to reconsider the overlooked and ordinary. McKay’s practice illuminates the poetic and performative potential of paper, revealing how a humble material can carry complex narratives, gestures, and meaning.

Holding (Left), Falling (Right), Ally McKay, 2025, framed system cards, staples and thread, 30cmx 40cm x 3cm. $350 each.

Practice in pointlessness, Ally McKay, 2025, digital video still, filmed and edited by Thomas Oliver.

Practice in pointlessness (2025), filmed and edited by Thomas Oliver, captures McKay’s repeated attempts to pierce sheets of paper with a sharp metal rod—an act complicated by the increasingly unpredictable movement of the paper itself. This futile yet determined effort becomes a material metaphor for persistence, discipline, and the pursuit of precision.

Extending her exploration of performance as both documentation and endurance, McKay sets herself a seemingly pointless task, engaging in a meditative process that tests patience and control. The work interrogates the tension between success and failure, questioning how we define each and where the threshold between them lies.

At what point does frustration give way to acceptance? When does persistence become its own kind of failure? Practice in pointlessness  invites us to consider the struggle for mastery and the overwhelming expectations placed upon us. Is it the attempt that matters most, or the outcome?

Interactive shots of participant engaging with Peaks and Troughs, Ally McKay, 2025, Logan Art Gallery. Photos courtesy of Louis Lim.

Peaks and Troughs (2025), draws inspiration from artist Erwin Wurm’s, One Minute Sculptures, inviting participants to engage in an ephemeral act of balance. The work encourages participants to arrange sheets of paper into five free-standing peaks, highlighting the delicate interplay between forces and the fragility of structure. Echoing McKay’s video, Failure is Not an Option (2023), where the artist forms paper structures against competing forces, this interactive sculpture requires hands-on participation and constant attention to maintain stability. The transient nature of the work emphasises the fleeting beauty of balance, inviting audiences to shape their own unique moment of balance and persistence.