The Glasshouse Gallery in Port Macquarie presents a spectacular seven-metre high hanging installation that fills the entire ground floor of the gallery space. The artwork, called Just like drops in time, nothing, by Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto, is an out-of-this-world construction made from lycra and pungent spices – that has to be seen and smelled to be believed.

Tony Bond from the Art Gallery of NSW has been in Port Macquarie all week supervising the installation of the artwork. The exhibition opening is tomorrow (Thursday) evening at 6pm, and the installation work is now nearing completion.

Tony Bond is available today (Wednesday) for interview and photo opportunities with the installation.

The exhibition will be open across the peak holiday season to offer visitors the opportunity to view a top quality exhibition in Port Macquarie’s which is in line with the national art institutions across Australia. Ernesto Neto, who is an internationally acclaimed artist, is represented in the major galleries and museums throughout the world.

Tony Bond, the Assistant Director of the Art Gallery of NSW, travelled to Port Macquarie to personally install the delicate art work. The sculptural installation, which is on loan to the Glasshouse from the Art Gallery of NSW, is incredibly fine and has the added complication of carrying over 300 kilograms of finest spices, including turmeric, cloves, paprika, cumin, pepper and fenugreek.
“The Glasshouse is a wonderful new venue for the Ernesto Neto Just like drops in time, nothing… Ernesto has installed monumental works using lycra and spice in major venues around the world including the Arsenale in Venice, The Pantheon in Paris, Tate Modern and Art Museums world wide,” says Bond.
“This work by Ernesto Neto combines an elegant constructivist aesthetic with steamy bodily life of the Amazon. Colourful and aromatic, this work is essentially interactive; each viewer inhales the work as well as enjoying its visual complexity. Its form is reminiscent of bodily forms and marine creatures or fungi in the rainforest and yet it retains the formal rigour of modernist architecture.”
Ernesto Neto is the leading artist of his generation in brazil at a time when Brazil and Latin America is producing some of the most exciting art of the late 20th and 21st Centuries
Neto came to Australia for a month to make this piece and worked with Tony Bond and a team from Newcastle University. He has given Bond permission to remake the work anywhere in Australia. “Anywhere else in the world, Ernesto would need to come and remake the piece himself, and he is a very busy young artist,” says Bond.
Through scale, form, smell and touch, Ernesto Neto’s work invites us to experience a heightened awareness of our own sensing and feeling bodies. His sculptural forms and installations are overwhelmingly sensual and yet they have a formal harmony and simplicity that derives from their conceptual clarity. They might be thought of as exemplary manifestations of Brazil’s dialogue between the modern megalopolis and the primordial jungle, where the constructed and the organic remain in permanent tension.
Just like drops in time, nothing has multiple associations, including rain capturing a ray of light or glancing through a forest, but it always refers back to the presence of the body, indicated by the bulging forms and even by the close association of lycra with underwear or stockings. At the same time there is a sublime architectural allusion created by the curving translucent arches that articulate the whole room.