This is a work of the outskirts – the landscapes of hard, shimmering heat, of hostile scrub, of torn and shredded paper blown about in dust. The fragility of life on the urban fringes is revealed in a range of absences – blank surfaces, dead ends, darkness.
On a nondescript plain a disused, dilapidated billboard is restored with fields of dense gold threadwork. The thread is an acknowledgement, a moment of attention, an offering; the work is a gesture, a thought, an exchange.
This work is made in collaboration with photojournalist Alkis Konstantinidis, whose compelling images of recent social unrest in Athens triggered a dialogue between us as strangers. In working over and through the work of Alkis I witness something of what another has witnessed, however small, and I respond. The photojournalistic process of documentation, distribution and presentation moves beyond the dispassionate registration of images of contemporary events – it re-contextualises a moment in time and humanises the image-maker.
An image of a devastated souk in Aleppo, Syria, is grafted onto a Coal Loader tunnel. A dialogue emerges through the restorative act of hand-stitching, quietly suggesting a sense of the global and an empathy for the other in a distant place and context.
Souk, 2013
Vinyl Mesh, Nylon
approximately 5 x 2.5m
Installation view at the Coal Loader, Waverton, Sydney
Photograph by Daily Telegraph photojournalist Will Wintercross
Breathing Buildings was an exhibition of works curated by Dr Julian Worrall in response to three buildings by acclaimed Japanese architect Kengo Kuma. A series of moving images and installations explored qualities of material dissolution based on real spatial experience, and conceptualised the buildings as a series of filters that act between body and environment. The exhibition was held at the Japan Foundation, Sydney.
This work was a floor-based temporal installation that grew from a quiet obsession with the ceiling in the Australia Square foyer. The ceiling was understood as a repetitious pattern of solid and void. The installation questioned the stark solid-void duality and investigated the invisible or barely-perceived physical matter that occupies the void spaces. The voids were reconsidered as positive volumes that have the capacity to cast a ‘shadow’ upon the floor. Fine particulate matter, a tangible physical component of air and a standard indicator of air quality, was captured and arranged on the floor plane in an intricate geometric pattern that placed the floor in direct visual dialogue with the ceiling.
The installation was comprised of two parts separated by external glass wall – one part was inside the foyer, and the other part continued outside. Inside, the voids of the ceiling grid were referenced on the floor using areas of finely crushed glass arranged directly on the floor. The crushed glass is considered as particulate matter, a luminous representation of the invisible suspended matter of the air. Outside, the solids of the ceiling grid were hand cut out of water-soluble embroidery film to form a geometric ‘web’, which was interspersed with areas of black silica. During the evening, performers and the audience sprayed a fine mist of water on the film, slowly dissolving the work until it disappeared completely. In this work, solid and void were inverted, reversed and imaginatively multiplied across the horizontal planes of the building.
The Liquid Air (Breathing Structure) explores relationships between atmospheric pollution and ocean acidification through a collaboration between artist-architect Ainslie Murray and marine spatial ecologist Renata Ferrari. The work is developed from images of eroded branching corals and infant corals struggling to survive in the acidified ocean. A complex three-dimensional ‘breathing’ structure is threaded through an architectural space to explore parallels between underwater structures (branching corals) and atmospheric structures (built environments).
This work creates an alternative landscape in a quiet corner of a garden. Set within the auditory landscape of vehicles passing along the motorway beyond, this striking image of a distant landscape transports the viewer elsewhere through its scale and circular form. The landscape is familiar yet remote, attractive yet hostile, and it speaks to an unrequited desire to be elsewhere.
Everyday Life is a creative research project involving collaborative practice across the disciplines of architecture, performance and engineering. Airflows within and around a pair of performers are visualised as they enact a series of improvised ‘everyday’ movements. The movements and resulting interactions are developed from ordinary, routine, and habitual patterns of daily life, that through their regularity become ‘invisible’. The visualisation of these patterns coupled with the visualisation of the contextual airflows form an architectural proposition in which space is agitated, stirred and concocted by the body and where inhabitants actively generate ‘architecture’ through their movement.
Aqueous Landscapes is an exhibition that explores the complexity and nuances of the constructed edge of Sydney Harbour, showing how the foreshore is used and experienced on both land and water. The exhibition is shaped by a monumental textile drawing, Unravelled Foreshore #1, that evokes the bays and inlets of a harbour journey as it curves through space. The drawing depicts an unfolded view of the Sydney Harbour foreshore over 45 metres, and undulates across multiple scales to reveal in detail the character of life in these distinctive public spaces. This drawing, developed from a photographic survey conducted by boat, captures the contemporary architectural, cultural and environmental conditions of Sydney Harbour at the rich interface of land and water. A short film, Intertidal Sections, also features in the exhibition. Imagery of water, edge and sky is spliced and then multiplied to reflect the material, ecological and atmospheric diversity of the Sydney Harbour. Aqueous Lanscapes was co-curated with Helen Lochhead, designed by Trigger Design and produced with Joshua Sleight.
Two rafts were walked along the tideline from Queenscliff to Shelley as part of the Manly Arts Festival.
These are rafts.They are made from bird spikes.
The bird spikes are sold as a ‘humane’ form of species control.
We install bird spikes on building ledges, signs and lights to prevent birds from landing.
Though beguiling in gleam and form, they embody an unthinkable hostility toward the other.
The assumption of the right of aggression toward another species insulates us from grasping the aggression of these objects.
Look to the bird that flies past you just now and to the person who stands quietly beside you.
