Political Bodies are works where arrayed drawing tables manifest a type of group political body: variously autocrats / rulers, citizens / subjects, parliamentarians / the elected. In each installation the viewer moves between and links dispersed bodies, completing another figure.
Bodies Politic
The inked self makes physical body prints on paper, which form a ground or landscape from which the drawing emerges. There is a playful use of scale in the attachment of small ink-jet transfer prints of 20th century and historical international political leaders, related to the various ‘continents’ of the world.
Body print, mixed media on cut, sewn paper, aluminium frame, acrylic sheet, 8 tables, 108 x 77 x 80cm each (installation view Shepparton Art Museum, Australia, 2015)
COUNCIL OF BODIES (KNOX CITY)
Rembrandt’s Function Centre, City of Knox, Melbourne.
This work marks a trail through an abandoned Function Centre in an outer suburb of Melbourne, Australia. Cladding boards carry the amending sweep of a mopped gesture of liquid clay slip that obscures details of the boards and image or texts, some of which are the stenciled lists of local city councilors. The boards are positioned against parts of the built interior – obscuring a number of kitsch reproductions of Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn’s paintings or leaning against columns, grouping around areas of floor, marking passages and so on. The boards follow a path that circles from the kitchen areas, through the adjacent servery areas and around the front-of-house dining areas. The work traces a mopping/cleaning motif from the service areas of Rembrandt’s through its public areas, relating both aspects. The cleaning, wiping-away gesture embedded in the clay and hoarding boards suggests a wiping out of memory, site and form yet one that is overlaid with ambivalent notions of agency or affirmation - the identity KNOX CITY and the names of individuals, perhaps locals in whose name Rembrandt’s does or does not exist.
Ply sheets, acrylic pigment, chalk, paper clay slip, size variable
CATALOGUE >
Dead Iraqis
Carlton Hotel & Studios, Melbourne, 2008.
The table top workspaces gather together assemblages of materials comprising body prints, mopped paper rolls, drawings, other excess and unused paper; and print transfers of images. Each table comprises six or seven strata of paper. Stacking of paper into three-dimensions opens up cavities, volumes and elisions while unfixed piles of paper produce massing but also collapses, falls and overflows. The composite form produces an instability of boundaries of the figure.
Ink, acrylic, body prints, water-colour on paper, paper, bubble-jet prints, pins, aluminium table, timber. Each 203 x 76 x 91cm.
Parliamentarians
Federation Festival Australia Projects, Victorian State Parliament House, Melbourne, 2001.
Four drawing tables install rendered images of politicians under glass at the entrances to the Legislative Council and the Legislative Assembly chambers of the Victorian State Parliament in Australia.
Parliament Desktop Drawings (Parliamentarians), pastel on linen, 8 timber tables, glass, various sizes
