Reassembling and reconstructing the evidence of man’s occupation of urban and rural landscapes and highlighting the accumulations and debris of our civilization or way of life has formed the main focus of my work over the past 20 years. The collection my own or other people’s hoarded ‘stuff’ plays a large part of this.
W[Rapt] for example consists of mostly donated shopping bags and wrappings, some mundane, including a couple of very well known food outlets, but many of them luxuriously manufactured to carry expensive clothing, jewellery, shoes and so on. Book shops all round the country are stuffed with old classics discarded in favour of up market reprints and I am regularly donated such books as people have clearouts.
Over the years I have used a variety of materials such as inner tubes, met tickets, phone books, fence droppers, steel strapping, corrugated iron, bracken sticks, echidna quills, emu eggs to name a few. Most materials are hand cut and reassembled often using textile linked techniques, quite laborious and time consuming work. Usually I have quite a few projects underway as the repetitive nature of hand cutting or weaving for example needs to be varied. Often these projects start small and become bigger installations or sculptures partly because there is an endless supply of consumed materials.
The attraction of using such an array of pre used ‘stuff’ is that its inbuilt history and associations, combined with relevant form, becomes an instrinsic and meaningful part of the work.
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