Mark Hislop

STATE to STATE 2025

Void_Melbourne
11 October - 8 November 2025

State to State brings together works that explore different kinds of transformation. The exhibition takes its title from the literal movement of materials—fragments of wall transported between cities and embedded in new locations—but this physical journey opens up broader questions about how things change state: from visible to hidden, from presence to absence, from solid documentation to something more ethereal and poetic.

 Spanning ten years of Mark Hislop's practice, these works reveal transformation as both a physical process and a way of thinking. Rather than focusing on fixed destinations or final outcomes, they explore the in-between spaces where change happens: the moment breath obscures an image, the hidden disk connecting distant studios, the slow dissolution from photograph to abstraction through drawing.

MEL/HEL/MEL (2015–16) with new iteration BWK/BKE/BWK (2025)

The exhibition extends Hislop's project MEL/HEL/MEL from 2015-2016 with a new iteration completed this year. For the current exhibition, Hislop will remove a circular section of wall from his present studio in Brunswick, Melbourne and embed it into the gallery wall at Void_Melbourne. As in the original work, he will extract a corresponding section from the gallery to fill the space left in his studio, creating sites of permanent reciprocal connection that the artist refers to as invisible architectural facts.

The original MEL/HEL/MEL began in November 2015, when Hislop commenced a three-month residency at the Helsinki International Artist Program (HIAP). Before departing Melbourne, he removed a small section of wall from his studio—fragments of paint and plaster—and cast these materials into a concrete disk measuring 15cm in diameter and 1.5cm deep. He transported this disk to Helsinki, where he embedded it into his residency studio wall, carefully extracting a corresponding circular section to return to Melbourne. Both disks were concealed with plaster and paint, making them invisible to future occupants.

The completed work exists as two permanent, hidden installations: a piece of Melbourne embedded in a Helsinki studio wall, and a piece of Helsinki embedded in Hislop's Melbourne studio wall. Neither intervention is detectable without prior knowledge of its existence.

MEL/HEL/MEL challenges conventional models of artistic mobility and cultural exchange. Rather than treating residencies as opportunities to gather material or experiences, the project engages with ideas of reciprocal transformation, acknowledging that meaningful cultural exchange is nuanced and complex, and often messy.

 This approach stands in stark contrast to the extractive practices that have historically characterised cultural exchange—particularly the systematic appropriation and removal of cultural artifacts by colonising powers. Major museums around the world continue to house thousands of objects taken without consent from colonised territories.

By embedding interventions directly into functional architectural structures, the work becomes part of their hidden material history, examining how built environments shape social relations while creating permanent reciprocal connections between distant locations.

My punctuation is my breath (2019)

This twelve-part drawing sequence engages with the literary legacy of Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian writer who conceptualised literature as process—an arduous mode of searching rather than resolution. Self-identified as an anti-writer, Lispector's work interrogated structures of power and gender through attention to subjective interiority.

My punctuation is my breath charts a movement from presence to absence. The recurring image of Lispector at her typewriter becomes increasingly obscured by her own breath— a contradictory gesture that keeps the momentum of the drawing moving forward whilst at the same time effacing the drawing, reflecting the writer's - and the artist’s - complex relationship with language and meaning.

It is to the air that I dedicate myself (2018)

This series of twelve graphite drawings takes as its starting point French pilot Raymonde de Laroche, the first woman to receive a pilot's licence and a pioneer in testing early powered aircraft. An actress, artist, and sportswoman, de Laroche spoke of her ethereal connection to flight, declaring shortly before her death in a 1919 accident: "It is to the air that I dedicate myself."

Working from a single photograph of de Laroche taken at the scene of her death, each drawing incrementally zooms in, moving from representation toward abstraction. Through this process, drawing both challenges the authority of the original photographic document and evokes de Laroche's poetic, immaterial relationship to flying

States of Transformation

The exhibition title State to State operates on multiple levels across these three bodies of work, connecting the literal movement of material in MEL/HEL/MEL with the conceptual transformations explored in both drawing series.

In MEL/HEL/MEL, "state to state" manifests as the physical transportation of matter—fragments of wall moving from Melbourne to Helsinki and back again. Yet this geographical movement creates a more profound transformation: the works exist in a permanent state of displacement, forever foreign to their locations while simultaneously becoming integral to their architectural fabric. The material undergoes a change of state from visible to invisible, from documented process to hidden presence.

The drawing works engage with different kinds of state change—transformations that are temporal, perceptual, and ontological. In My punctuation is my breath, Lispector's image moves through states of visibility, progressively obscured by the very breath that enables her literary voice. The work charts a movement from presence to absence, where each drawing represents a different state in this process of effacement. The breath itself embodies transformation—from the internal act of breathing to the external mark-making that simultaneously creates and destroys the image.

It is to the air that I dedicate myself traces de Laroche's transformation from corporeal presence to ethereal absence, moving from photographic documentation toward pure abstraction. Each incremental zoom represents a change of state—from representation to abstraction, from the weight of historical documentation to the lightness of poetic interpretation. De Laroche's dedication "to the air" becomes a literal dissolution into abstraction, her physical form gradually giving way to the immaterial realm she claimed as her domain.

Across all three works, Hislop explores how meaning itself can change state—from visible to invisible, from presence to absence, from material fact to poetic possibility. The exhibition reveals transformation as both physical process and conceptual operation, where geographic, temporal, and perceptual states become fluid, interconnected conditions rather than fixed categories. In this reading, "State to State" becomes less about movement between distinct locations or conditions, and more about the liminal spaces where transformation occurs—the breath between presence and absence, the hidden disk that connects distant walls, the progressive abstraction that honours both documentation and dissolution.