Ideas Platform opening | Parramatta Artists Studios: EJ Son 'Fountain'

EJ Son’s Fountain imagines a metaphorical solution for the ‘constipated heart’—a term the artist uses to describe a clenched (typically cis-male) soul incapable of emotional expression. In this new presentation for Artspace, twelve bidets face each other in a circular assembly, each releasing a pressurised jet of fluid. These streams spurt from the ceramic bowl towards a central peak before disappearing beneath metal grates. They arc towards one another, almost but never quite touching.

Son’s Ideas Platform exhibition is accompanied by a new artist book, Confessions, which gathers ten images with written responses from the artist. The publication reveals key references from Son’s personal archive, traversing comic, nipple castings, clay pots, museum holdings, wrestling dummies and more. As parallel presentations of the artist’s practice, Fountain and Confessions extend Son’s ongoing interrogation of the gendered and racialised self, opening space for new forms of subjectivity to emerge.

EJ Son: Fountain and Confessions are part of the eighth annual collaboration between Artspace and Parramatta Artists Studios (PAS), a partnership that supports curatorial dialogue, mentorship and advocacy for artists in Western Sydney.