Everything and Nothing

Catalogue essay by Andrew Harper, 2026

‘My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow’

Andrew Marvell
(date of writing unknown, thought to be the 1650s)

The world, which has everything in it all the time, insists on our attention.

It is good to know what is happening, and to consider what can be done; there are also always all the tasks we must perform to just run our lives and for them to be manageable. One almost cannot blink, because something looms, or needs attending to, or has been pushed to one side, but still nips at one’s conscious hours. It’s great to be well read, too, and that’s perhaps another thing that takes up time, and it can be, well, exhausting.

Chelsea Gustafsson lives in the world, and understands how it insists, and how it has everything in it, very well. Chelsea, however, likes to pause, and breathe in slowly, and make an intermission, a small suspension from insistent everything.

Her art emerges from exploration, intuition, accident and play. Working with a lexicon of objects, seeking them out from charity emporiums or allowing them to come to her studio; a mug might arrive as gift from another hemisphere, a reflective glass sphere might be found, launching a languid exploration of reflective objects.

A mirror ball sits atop an understated ceramic mug, tan with a single navy-blue line: mundane objects become something more: hints of gravity and precarious physics merge with cardboard that stares back and a slight but certain domestic weirdness gently hatches. Tiny faces are found that slowly germinate, like alien lichens; structures of fine balance grow with as if fungal, apprehending light in reflections; the artist and her family are lured in, becoming part of the spreading architecture, cultivated from personal design that is a frictional duality of coincidence and deliberation.

The process, intuitive, follows an undercurrent implied by each object, working through a submerged, mycological reasoning. These things extrude themselves, then suggest other strategies They become funny and uncanny and potent, accidental and filled with purpose; they never stop just being mugs and googly eyes and card while becoming talismans and rituals that grant a moment outside of everything, a fragment of weightless time conjured from this still alchemy.

These arrangements are captured, finally, as paintings, meticulous renderings of the arrangements, which are altered slightly again: one small smiley face symbol spreads like cheerful mould from painting to painting, like a mycorrhizal network.

They are of the world, because the world does have everything in it, but they are also moments where the world was on hold, and remain so: balanced perfect contradictions, fragments made whole, small reflections of a much larger image.