Paula McCambridge, an emerging artist living and working in Sydney, completed her Bachelor of Fine Art at the National Art School in 2017.
McCambridge, who grew up in Tasmania, creates two and three-dimensional objects and environments from found materials. She works extensively with underlay, composed of coloured polyurethane foam, felt and gold laminate using it to line rooms, sculpt objects and as a surface for painting.
Underlay, a utilitarian industrial material functions as support material insulating and providing comfort for the floors we walk on, but once it has been laid it becomes invisible.
McCambridge uses underlay in her practice because of the inherent symbolic meaning embedded in its materiality and purpose. She finds this acutely reflects her experience with gender roles and hierarchies.
In bringing industrial materials into a fine art context, McCambridge elevates and highlights their aesthetic properties and suggests a simple proposition: to make visible what is otherwise supressed, forgotten or censored.