Since each of us was several, there was quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as fartherest away. (Deleuze & Guattari, in the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, 3)

Connections


This mind-map is not intended to be a definitve analysis of the project; it is only a summary of thinking at a certain point in time--a means of listing all the various ideas circulating in my brain and testing connections. And another way of identifying similarities and disparities between the process of writing a blog and making a quilt (as well as between the three quilts themselves).

Monday, August 6
I intend to spend time developing this Page further.

On Friday, I was reading a book of interviews with the poet, Charles Wright and quite unexpectedly came across some comments he has made about 'connections':
Making connections is the impulse of all art, I think. The artist's job is to try and keep the connections from being made completely, so the synapses can snap and spark. (Interview with David Remnick, 1983 from Interviews, 1979-2006, Robert D. Denham (ed), p24)

Edge of the Trees:
I have a favorite installation which I visit whenever I can and this is Edge of the Trees (1995) which stands outside the Museum of Sydney (built on the site of the first Government House). It is immediately recognisable as a series of poles which arise out of the pavement outside the entrance to the museum. Move closer and you hear a murmur of voices, words spoken in another language. Move through and between the poles and decipher the text, the materials contained within some of the poles (ash, oxides, feathers, honey & wax, hair, shells & bones) and the different materials from which the poles are made (zinc, granite, wood, steel, sandstone).
The words spoken are in 'Darug' and 'Eora', an aboriginal language, and by a number of different voices they 'evoke through naming'. The sound is musical, meditative and repetitive; the words name the flora in the Darug and Eora language.
As a space, the work acknowledges the Sydney Aboriginal peoples, the peoples of the First Fleet, the varied flora of the Sydney area. 
Each time I visit, I find something different. 
The separate elements of the installation both connect and contrast a "...dislocation of transition necessitates a shift in perception" (Edge of the Trees, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, published 2000).


Edge of the Trees was designed by Janet Laurence and Fiona Foley.


Janet Laurence: is an artist whose work kept coming to mind when I was drawing up the mind map shown at the top of this page. She works in that interstitial (liminal) space between art and science, memory and imagination...which evokes multiple narratives. To me the works are as fragile, as fleeting as memory, as potentially unstable as imagination.


 The Matter of Nature (2000)

Into Light/Trace Elements (2000-2001) to Lost birds series


Site Unseen (2004)


Forensic Sublime (2008)


Botanical Residues (2009)


State Library of NSW: The Governor, Lachlan Macquarie 1810 to 1821 (July3 -October 10, 2010) - I visited on Friday, September 17
Macquarie Collector's Chest (I have already made number of connections with Lost birds.
Llewellyn Chest ('a response to the Macquarie Chest') original made in Newcastle, specimens from Hunter area (where Pamela lives), the Llewellyn also includes specimens from same area (although neither contain examples of the glossy-black or any other cockatoo, perhaps they are too large to be included?)


Macquarie founded colony's first 'lunatic asylum' in 1811 (catalog p18). The mentally ill had previously been confined in Parramatta town gaol...(seems like we may have gone around in a circle here)...therefore connections to Big House and Reconfiguring the Wall.
Macquarie seemed very active in building colony's institutions, roads and bridges.  


Ryan Brenan (Reconfiguring) arrived (as a free settler) some ten years after Macquarie left. 




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