Something like a laboratory, Hugo Blomley has litres of chemicals stacked in the corner of his studio. Two separate workbenches are covered with drills and hardware, screws and nails, discarded moulds, half-opened adhesives tubes and mislabelled plastic bottles. Another bench wraps around the perimeter of the space littered with scales, epoxy, bottles of acetone, a heat gun, methylated spirits, pigments, gel coats and industrial grade enamel test pots. Wax, plaster casts and moulds pile up on the floor.
Blomley’s studio is a repurposed underground parking lot with high ceilings and concrete floors. By the door on the wall, is a photograph of a brunette wearing a bikini — March 2025. I hear the buzzer click sporadically as people enter and leave ‘Kippenberger Studios’, the 550m2 studio allotment in North Melbourne, opened in the winter of 2024, that Blomley rents out to thirty other artists (the reading group, ‘Dunce’, led by Harriet Hester Jones runs out of the Studios periodically as well). Initially requesting a twenty-five-year lease, after negotiations in which he had to convince the owners that ‘the business was legit and I wasn’t going to burn the place down’, he signed an agreement for six years. The communal space mimics the living room of a Parkville apartment where he used to live with friends of ours. A painting by Joshua Krum hangs in the space, a pile of assorted magazines lay atop thrifted furniture — a quiet disorder. The studios are well lit, functionally well-designed and hand-built by Blomley himself. He’s resourceful, clearly. Carrying a boyish confidence, he speaks openly about his practice, yet he’s noticeably twenty-six years old; It’s impressive.
Blomley’s past work has consistently addressed the pair. A way, he tells me, ‘two people could relate to each other’. Take the two chairs facing one another on a hand-built pine and tallowwood one-storey plinth at the VCA Undergraduate show (2020), the two pillars resembling matchsticks, smeared in red lipstick at the Monash Honours show (2022), the two pale grey-green, epoxy-coated forms coined ‘turbine sculptures’ at Sutton Gallery (2022), or the two petrol bowsers — one made of MDF, one made of acrylic — connected by PVC piping circulating a continuous feedback loop of dead air at Asbestos (2023). The function of the pair in his work implies a mirroring. The closed binary of this mirroring suggests the inability for one to exist without the other. An intimacy akin to twins.
The irrational incapacity for one thing to exist without the other is in effect a neurotic response, one closely associated with borderline personality disorder. The borderline personality is characterised by an unrelenting fear of abandonment; it is an affliction so overwhelming that it inspires a perverse proclivity to merge with another. Throughout this process, termed ‘splitting’, the sufferer attributes a chosen other with unique, rare or superb qualities — adulation they inevitably disappoint. The borderline will then undergo the process of devaluation, in which favouring is followed by self-fulfilling abandonment. The formal mirroring in Blomley’s work closely echoes the borderline operative and its obsession with merging.
‘The work always begins with the mould,’ he tells me. The object used to create it is almost irrelevant, incidental, even; what matters is the negative space it leaves behind. When that space is later filled, the resulting form always bears the trace of what came before — deliberately replicating the imperfections of a discarded object. Even in stand-alone sculptures, the logic of the pair remains. Blomley, who doesn’t share the vulnerability of his artworks, seems drawn to a process that holds his own intimacy at a distance.
An out-take from his recent show Same eyes as yesterday, at Neon Parc, South Yarra (5–26 April 2025), lays discarded on the bench behind me; gouged out pieces define the curved obelisk. I point to the work and ask if it’s going to be rescued. A phallic, fibreglass monument that did make it into the show similarly came out as a rough cast and had to be worked on: filled, sanded, polished, painted and coated in clear resin. Layers of pastel epoxy, applied in a fluid patination, resemble the surface of a gobstopper. The materials themselves, epoxy, resin and fibreglass all contain toxic chemicals. To that list the artist adds himself: ‘I don’t want to contaminate the works with myself’.
It is an essential characteristic of the handmade that it will never guarantee uniformity. As such, the handmade throughout history has been held to higher standards than its machine-produced counterpart. We have an expectation of immediate mechanical perfection, while the handmade is artisanal and polished — refined from imperfection to distinction. If we consider, for a moment, the stylistic intentions of a master such as Rembrandt, his paintings were known (particularly his late work) for their rough surfaces and unfinished appearance, revealing stages of the painting process that his contemporaries aimed to conceal.[1] Similarly, to Blomley, ‘the seam is important, I don’t want these to be tight, refined sculptures. I want the seam, the mark and the touch all to be visible’. The absence of uniformity and the unpredictability of the handmade suggests the artist’s desire for the human touch to be reflected to us.
The work harbours a tension between perfection and imperfection — whether or not Blomley is entirely fascinated by it. An untitled pastel pink sculpture, resembling a wishbone (see below), highlights impressions from the seams of the mould. Ironically, he explains how it was hard to retain these blemished details during casting. ‘Normally I would chip a bit off or scratch it, but I had to treat it quite carefully.’ The ‘perfection’ of the pink wishbone is contained in its imperfection — the seams and layers that reveal its construction. Unlike the related column sculpture (see above), which Blomley tirelessly rendered to achieve a glossy finish. He explains, ‘the perfect thing was the original object, which was fucked, but also, the perfect thing was the thing that was polished’. A fundamental contradiction generated in him by the conflict between wanting to show the artist’s hand but also wanting to exist outside of it. With some dread, he admits ‘no one can really ever exist outside of anything’.
Typically given to female patients, the borderline diagnosis considered in the context of Blomley’s masculine-coded formalism emphasises the sexuality of the cast and the mould — the ultimate coupling. The merging of two people through sexuality satisfies the oneness of owning and being owned. The fear of annihilation, associated with girls, is an experience in contrast to the male fear of castration.[2] Both circle around the existential threat of not existing at all, because who would a man be if not without his sex? Blomley recalls the work exhibited in the Monash Honours Show, appearing alongside another libidinally-charged phallic form. ‘I wanted to make a lipstick to smear on these works, and I made it, and I was going to put it on later, but it was ready, and I was just there, and it’s all over my hands, and it’s a mess, smearing it on the forms.’ One could envision Blomley handling the paint, applying it to his pair with ferocious intensity.
Some of Blomley’s most recent works appear polished and reflective, while others dense, opaque and light-absorbing. They touch on an erotic middle-ground — the space between sensing, where the artist’s hand is inferred but not granted. The impulse to merge has been sublimated into the surface treatment, where feeling is now disguised beneath impenetrable layers. Yet, withholding intimacy doesn’t eliminate it, it’s simply reconfigured. As Paul Klee once wrote, ‘I think that the painter must be penetrated by the universe and not want to penetrate it’. So sincere, so horny.
[1] Melanie Gifford, ‘Rembrandt and the Rembrandtesque: the experience of artistic process and its imitation’, in Marika Spring & Ashok Roy (eds.), Rembrandt Now: Technical Practice, Conservation and Research, The National Gallery, London, 2022, pp. 84-94.
[2] See Juliet Mitchell, Siblings, Sex and Violence, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2003.