‘Dark Euphoria’ is the initial outcome of a continuing collaboration between myself and S.A. Adair. This installation, held at Tuggeranong Arts Centre (2021), is a series of poetic, domestic objects made from ground charcoal, sourced from the 2019-20 South East Australian mega-fires. The objects appear upon scattered, crushed eggshell.
The immersive and seductive blackness of the charcoal shapes is void-like, evoking rich aesthetic traditions; vessels as stilled life and Buddhism’s endless Sunyata. The luminosity and unboundedness of collapsed and ground eggshell enhances the depth of each object. Together, we collected and ground charcoal remnants from the fires while we engaged in an ongoing collaborative conversation between each other and our bushfire affected community. We cast the ground dust within domestic forms; our domestic environments re-cast through the impact of the fires.
The seductive, portal-like blackness of each object shimmers, dynamically pulling the viewer within its boundary towards an unknown, visceral expanse.
Image credits: Tuggeranong Arts Centre
For ‘because you are there I am here’ I appropriated a design feature from an 18th Century Tibetan divination text, where each individual page of the book functions independently, sequentially and also as part of a larger image when the individual pages are re-arranged. The multiple functions of each page within the reflexive pecha form was the platform I used to undertake a year-long durational process to make the pecha set (2 texts, 128 pages).
Considered as three-dimensional objects that are animated differently through different kinds of use, pechas reveal technologies that convey fluidity and transience. By bringing personal stories into play with their flexible structure, participants and viewers were be drawn in to consider the fluid and contingent nature of experience.
A collaboration with Naomi Zouwer, Cut-out was an exhibition at the Belconnen Arts Centre where we explored the re-contextualising potential of the cut-out. The work emerged through a collaborative and reflexive process where we responded to each others work over time, to explore quilting traditions and the lineage of artists who use the cut-out such as Cornelius Gijsbrecht (1630 - 1683), Henri Matisse (1869 - 1954), and contemporary artist Kara Walker.
Looking for the i in desire was a year-long durational project that culminated in an exhibition at Craft ACT. The project draws on the deconstructive strategies of Buddhist meditation on emptiness: causality and the gap between object and representation in combination with textile approaches (printing, cutting, piecing and Indian embroidery such as shisha and kantha). Text and textiles embody temporal concerns that emerged in relation to my durational/ reflexive method.
Each day for three months participants contributed a floral motif (from fabric, wallpaper, paper, etc.), and a description of their attachment to it. Floral imagery was representative of the seductive yet often unconscious ‘background’ imagery of life and things that draw upon us with subterranean force. I responded to the objects and text by composing a one-hour piece of writing to develop a floral and textual archive. Over the next three months I returned daily to reconsider each contribution and my response by making and writing. This response has become a series of installation works and two artist books that reappraising floral textiles to make visible unconscious desires.
Even is a durational work for which, daily for a year, I embroidered the names of people who had died onto artificial flower petals that I found at the Bookham cemetery. Death, a bit like floral imagery, is one of those things we don’t notice until we are directly affected. I wanted to embroider the name of anyone I heard about who had died, and use the time of embroidery to reflect on each life as fully as I could.
I created this installation as part of an Artists-in-schools residency at Lyneham Primary School. Using floral fabrics donated by the school community I responded to the stairwell by combining textile references I found within the school with a traditional Buddhist floral motif. The installation drew students into the stair for conversation about contemporary installation practice and to collaborate with ideas for where the installation should ‘grow’.
Interrogating Selves was my doctoral exhibition, held in the School of Art Gallery, ANU. The spaces in-between thinking reconfigures striped fabrics into organic forms, taken from floral fabrics. It is about the easing of conceptual thought that surfaces through meditation.
Flux is made with individually embroidered mirrors installed directly onto the wall. The multi-directional placement disrupts the mirrors reflective function, making it impossible for the viewer to locate oneself with any coherence. When viewing Flux the only sense of reflection comes through movement.
Portal is three inkjet prints on silk satin fabric. The pattern on each print is created by bringing contemporary striped fabrics into play with a design that is common on textiles and architecture throughout Asia and the Middle East, and has endured from ancient times until today.
The formal, organic pattern ruptures the surface to create three dimension-like spaces beyond the woven stripes. The complexity of each stripe accelerates when re-configured, becoming a portal that draws the viewer. The high quality print on silk satin creates an illusion as it difficult for the viewer to ascertain whether the object is a piece of woven cloth, or a print.
The Suffering Project is an artist book set that I developed by appropriating an Indo-Tibetan, ‘pecha’, book making tradition. ‘Root texts’ contain pithy religious instruction. Commentaries are reflections that unpack a root text, created by teachers over centuries.
I developed the content using a durational and reflexive process in combination with the Tibetan Buddhist practice ‘Tonglen’. Tong means to give, and len, to receive. Practising Tonglen involves progressively experiencing the suffering of others which is then transformed within the practitioner, into love and compassion. Compassion is then re-directed to the object of meditation practice.
I constructed a process whereby, over three months, daily, 90 contributors told me a story of suffering that I recorded and transcribed. I then found a related object and embroidered upon this object a resonant phrase from the story. In the subsequent three months I reconsidered each story-object and then chose and embroidered a new phrase on the same object. These new phrases were sourced from a Buddhist mind training text, intended as a suitable ‘antidote’ to the suffering/ embroidered text.
I presented the contributed stories as a ‘root text’ and the embroidered story-objects as a book of commentary.
10000 words is made from stamped, crushed eggshell. The work is the culmination of doctoral research for which a requirement was a 10000 word exegesis. As a method to reflect upon my writing for this exegesis, I stamped the draft text onto eggshells, using rubber letters and an ink pad. I then crushed the eggshells with a mortar and pestle and recorded the sound over a period of many weeks, recording and re-recording to craft the right ‘tinkling’ sound. The shape is approx 6m x 3m in size and derives from a floral textile. The sound is projected softly above the work and directed by an elevated cone, making it possible to hear only when in close proximity to the work.
fingersnaps and watermoons was an exhibition at Australian National Capital Artists in
