Humanity Lost (work in progress)

Humanity Lost work in progress 2015

Photograph Huw Greenhough

Working in the gallery. Photograph Huw Greenhough

In April 2015 I was invited to exhibit with the XS Collective at the Mildura Arts Centre. Artists were asked to exhibit work that dealt with issues of excess, I installed a variation of The Maker and The User.
Shortly before the exhibition opened Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan were executed in Indonesia.
I  responded to this cruel, inhumane, and degrading form of 'justice' by making a handkerchief depicting an embroidered portrait of the two men. I worked in the gallery throughout the exhibition, talking to people from the gallery floor where I sat sewing. In my absence the unfinished work was hung on the wall.

Detail of Humanity Lost 2015

Humanity Lost 2015

Exploded Dialogue

This work was a part of Communication Beyond Words, a cross cultural exchange project between Colombia and Australia curated by Erika Siabatto and Michelle Mantsio with the support of the Academy of Design in Melbourne and Unitec in Bogotá.

Exploded Dialogue

2015

Removable felt and thread

Dimensions variable

Photographer: Simon Cotching

When a colourful drawing in felt tip pen and ink from an artist in Colombia arrived in my post box I did not quite know how to respond to it. The work was not accompanied by text, not even the artist’s name or gender, any context to the work was only imagined. In a way, the work became mine, free to interpret however I felt, I became it's surrogate author.

Communicating across languages and cultures offers us a similar freedom, when we are speaking to a person from a different background we are often filling in the gaps, the I don’t understand gaps with information from our own imagination, or assumptions. We feel free to use the parts that we understand, to create meaning for ourselves in the dialogue resulting in a story that might be less or more interesting than the one actually presented to us. I have responded to the work from Colombia in a similar way, taking shapes and colours from the work and pulling them out of their context for the viewer to re-arrange. The final work to be in a state of flux, to be re-configured but never completely understood or complete.