National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | The National Sculpture Prize and Exhibition 2005

I wanted to capture an aspect of natural history in a state of suspended animation. I was hoping it might be beautiful, but also sad, as if the software I’d used had inadvertently caused its demise. It would be simultaneously alive and deathly. Of course, sculpture has always contended with this problem. As much as I wanted to reiterate the very objecthood and kinaesthesia that sculpture tends to engage in one way or another, I also wanted to cast a shadow of doubt across the current tide of digital effects and media. I decided that a manta ray would be suitably complicated – they seem to drift between post-millennial spookiness and weird evolution, a natural phenomenon that is already coloured by the way we understand modern design. They are obscure but familiar, gentle by nature but large enough to be intimidating. They are often referred to as devil rays. I started working with an industrial designer to produce the sculpture. I wanted geometry to do most of the work for us – in other words, to build a manta ray in the same way that one might use compound curves to design the body of a sports car, to describe the surface in a way that was almost too perfect. It was important that we followed a biologically accurate template. We selected a moment from some underwater footage that captured the graceful, downward thrust of the creature’s fins. Working from magazine articles, and drawings and maquettes I had made, we then created a virtual description of the fish, tracing the various lines of its body to create a surface that was symmetrical and seamless. This information was passed on to a computer-controlled milling machine that literally carved the manta ray from solid blocks of foam, actualising a form in real-space that corresponds exactly to the shape described by the software we were using. It is a digitally produced sculpture, caught attempting to swim back into an analogue universe. I like to think of it as a distant relative of the sweeping roof above Le Corbusier's chapel at Ronchamp. A number of my friends commented that it looks like an evolved surfboard. Either way, we mostly agree that it appears to be acutely modern, but suspiciously odd. Photography: Adam Reich

Double self-portrait is a sculptural re-exploration of concepts first undertaken through a body of aquatints while on a Harkness Fellowship in 1983–85 at Columbia University. At that time it was my intention to take back ground previously thought to be the domain of the painter, namely their facility to distort scale in an illusionary space. Giacometti explored similar issues by the placement of figures within an inferred landscape, resulting in the manipulation of our perception of their scale. In the case of Double self-portrait, the viewer is drawn into the pictorial space created by the black frame and may begin to imagine the two portraits to be of vast proportions. Double self-portrait also explores our perception of self and its many incarnations. The recurring fascination I have with ‘anima’ – the sculptural study of personality and more specifically its resulting investigation of the female side of the male personality – is a focus for Double self-portrait. For many years this has been a constant and ongoing theme in my studio practice. Photography: John Gollings

I am interested in chaos and complexity theories, where simple units form complex systems and if you follow those systems it somehow connects us to the universe. In Woven water: submarine landscape I want to create the illusion of the ocean and its currents. The piece is commenting on the environmental impact tourism has on animals and our planet. Although the feeling evoked in a viewer ‘immersed’ in the artwork is peace and tranquillity, the frozen and dry nature of these sea creatures hints at their ghostlike and melancholic end. Photography: Ross Rudesch Harley

The correct distance between objects is critical, whether that distance is physical, cultural or emotional. Two objects too close to each other become one, Two objects too far apart no longer relate to each other. Intrigued by experiments with chance relationships, accidental spatial configurations and a type of spontaneous feng shui, the focus of the work is not only the objects – whether found, made or observed – but the space around, between and inside the objects, being the cultural or emotional significance of the objects. I often observe Australia from outside Australia; I want to see how it is perceived from another position and also from cultures within Australia. Following an invitation to work in Vietnam in 1998, and my experience of living in Vietnam, the work references Australia’s involvement with Vietnam and Vietnamese migrants in Australia. This work deals with characters, events and locations that are significant in that which has helped shape Australia: Gallipoli, Mabo, Banjo Patterson, Maralinga, etc. American crater near Hanoi #2 is a work that deals with the physical, emotional and historical nature of space and place. Since my first visits to Vietnam I have been documenting bomb craters. While measuring, filming, tracing and photographing these emotive and politically charged spaces one discovers a morbid fascination with these shapes, and a haunting beauty about their physical, cultural and emotional form. This space, once occupied, is undergoing constant change. American crater near Hanoi #2 is motivated by recent involvement with a non-profit organisation, PROJECT RENEW in Quang Tri Province Central Vietnam. Their primary objectives are Mine Risk Education (MRE), and to clear Quang Tri Province and neighbouring regions of landmines and other unexploded ordinances. Photography: Ionas Kaltenbach

Flowers are organs of plant procreation – they attract insects to act as vectors for fertilisation. But flowers also appeal Flowers are organs of plant procreation - they attract insects to act as vectors for fertilisation. But flowers aslo appeal to humans. To us, a flower’s beauty is defining of all that is pure and joyful in the world. The majesty of the annual – the flower that blooms with all its vitality for one short moment before withering away – plays out the tragedy of life in a single act: ‘we grow, we are beautiful, we die’. The solitary flower domesticated in a pot is emblematic of suburban iconography. Flowerpots are living garden objects that we have brought closer to us, onto the patio, where we can tend them carefully and enjoy their presence at close quarters. The squared-off flowers of Floribots are well removed from the organic domain. They are mechanoids. However, in a way they too can play out the drama of life and death – bloom and wither – and they can show us other things as well... Floribots consists of 128 computer-controlled robot origami flowers arranged in an eight-by-sixteen grid spread over thirty-five square metres of floor space. Each robot flower is able to extend telescopically from a rest condition to grow one metre vertically, then suddenly invert its origami ‘flower’ into an open bloom state. The unit can also re-contract back down into its latent state and refold its origami bloom back into the bud condition. Floribots acts as an interactive collective organism with ‘hive mind’ characteristics. It is capable of sensing audience movement and of adapting its behaviours accordingly. It is a ‘field of flowers’ that dances in unison, with choreography provided by its embedded microcontroller. The flower matrix can exhibit complex wave propagation behaviours as well as describing responsive surface features and entering periods of chaotic motion. The Floribot mind is able to control transitions between these states and can ‘learn’ as it runs over time by acclimatising itself to an installation site and developing a particular set of behaviour preferences. Photography: Geoffrey Drake-Brockman

Selving could be splitting, halving or doubling a temporary manifestation of a continual transfer of sorts. Selving could be a to and fro of thin air contained in plastic forms in a scale approximate to your body. A transfer might occur between you and it as you imagine yourself in there. So where are you, where am I, where does that and this self start or finish? If you imagine yourself in there or refracted and multiplied in a mirror, or you imagine yourself left for the worms in a wooden box, or perhaps you imagine yourself standing nearby in your skin, or perhaps find yourself in a daydream someplace faraway. I like to imagine ghosts floating through walls. If I could know the frequency of the wall matter could I float through? Would it be slow or fast? Maybe I could lose all definition, maybe lose myself. When I was working on this piece a little fly got trapped in the plastic, which I didn’t notice until after I had titled the show in a general way Flowers, flies and someone else. It was a strange coincidence but it seemed that the fly was there to stay. Photography: Robert Colvin

Folded and glued like free-standing ‘point of a sale’ advertisements, hundreds of crisp, white cardboard cut-outs make up the floor installation Bonsai landscape. The objects are precisely placed so they turn, robot-like, in strictly controlled conformity to each other. From one particular viewpoint the viewer sees a dense, miniature forest of repetitive, tree-like imagery; from the opposite view the folds create an intricate panorama of cloned geometry that transforms and shifts like a tonal animation as the viewer moves around the ensemble. There are three protagonists. Scattered throughout a forest of bonsai trees are images of an inscrutable rock in dialogue with a fire hydrant. Together the components inscribe a shape on the gallery floor, reminiscent of the monoculture of commercial forestry, configured to map the shape of the 2003 bushfires in and around Canberra. The bonsai image, nature fictionalised, is derived from a photograph of a grove of trees I noticed growing along a gully on a hillside in Utah, in the United States. The fire hydrant and rock are someone’s valiant attempt at ‘urban landscaping’ in a vast, desert-like car park nearby. Together these images suggest that, like Leonardo da Vinci’s stains on a wall, meaning or narrative can be ascribed to anything our imaginations care to interpret. They remind us that nature is an economic unit, a throwaway consumable. It is also culturalised, destructive, exoticised and metaphysical. It is a biological system that we inhabit as deluded animals, human frailty ‘in control’. Image: Detail

Caryatid Minotaur is ostensibly an arch, yet the caryatids are too close together to allow a person to pass. The tension set up by this contradiction invites reflection on the mirror-finished horns of this dilemma. Reflection in all meaning of the word. I have been fascinated by Greek mythology from an early age and I have previously worked with the Icarus and Minotaur myth. They all seem to resonate very well when contemplating the myth and confusion of contemporary life and art politics, as well as what one might euphemistically call the real world. This sculpture is also important to me because of the introduction of curved lines and surfaces. It opens up a whole new field for me and I am excited by the possibilities that I am now pursuing in a series of maquettes. It is important to me that a work is open to layers of interpretation, and that it is conceptually rich and invites speculation. Of equal importance is the physical presence of the sculpture as an icon that exercises its power through other than intellectual modes of perception. Image: Maquette for 'Caryatid Minotaur' 2004 stainless steel, private collection, Perth Photography: Dr Michael Prichard

Moth forms the next work in my exploration of exoskeleton and prosthetic architecture. NASA moon photographs depicting a sole astronaut roaming next to his flimsy vehicle are evoked. Travelling on a sea of equations the journey into space is made. Similarly, all aesthetic judgements are born of number and calculus. The language of numbers in Moth intersects with my obsessive-compulsive past. Moth is about metamorphosis and the journey towards light or a solution. Such is the short life of the Moth emerging from its exoskeleton carapace to fly its erratic vectors before succumbing to the strange attractor of pure light. Moth is a central metaphor for the human condition, which combines a Moth Boat with the prospect of the viewer as a driver.

My older sister would, in a three-dimensional Superman comic sort of typeface, loudly proclaim her ownership by writing her name over and over on her things. Mum became particularly aggrieved when her graffiti branding colonised her school textbooks, obliterating title and author. I remember Steff’s response to Mum’s protests: ‘It’s only writing, that’s what books are’. Perhaps it’s the overlaying and assertion of independent thought on the existing that allows us to make our own structures and find our own meanings. It is how we shuffle language and symbol to form blocks of pattern, how we stack shades of opinion, one on another, how we lay facts and fictions side by side, how we order, rank and classify the views of others that allows us to find space – a little void to calibrate our own experience, a place to put our own thoughts. Photography: Peter Whyte

Physicists have amassed a lot of information about the universe, considering that they have gathered it from Earth – a mere grain of sand in the scheme of things. Many theories about space/time are challenging. Indeed it is often the gap between an abstract concept about the nature of space/time and my everyday experience of it that is the motivating force behind my work. Unbounded space speculates about the shape of an expanding universe. Einstein was the first to suggest that space might be finite yet unbounded. Steven Hawking and James Hartle propose that in the very first moments of the Big Bang space and time were merged. They claim that the origin of the universe becomes redundant when the Big Bang singularity is ‘smoothed out’. As Hawking states, ‘the boundary condition of the universe is that it has no boundary’.[1] The universe just is. To help visualise an expanding universe physicists sometimes use the image of an inflating balloon. They imagine dots on the balloon representing galaxies and the space between the galaxies stretching as the balloon inflates. Speculation about the shape of a universe that is finite, with no boundaries, curved by gravity and expanding, has produced a series of sculptures that have evolved along an eccentric path. The development of a sculpture is governed only partially by the concept, because the material relationships, the limitations, possibilities and formal properties combine to create the final piece, and in the case of Unbounded space the materials played a significant role. The best works transcend the original idea. While reflecting on how the universe might appear from outside is fraught with problems, there is an exhilarating freedom in this unknown territory. The work is idiosyncratic, derived not from mathematical modelling of space or the result of scientific analysis of observable data. In fact, the work has more in common with creation myths than real science. I am aware of the folly of my enterprise. I console myself that many theories about the universe are yet to be proved and we may never be able to visualise the shape of space. Ultimately, we must accept the mystery. [1] P Davies, The mind of God, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992, p.68. Photography: David Paterson

The phenomenological playfulness in the process of model making is guided by Jonathan Swift’s descriptions of the inversions of scale between humans and architectural environments in Gulliver’s travels. In his sojourn on Lilliput, Gulliver was housed within the outer walls of a large property but was unable to access the interior of any building other than to peer through windows. This play on the denial of access to space other than through tiny vistas triggers the imagination of the viewer in a particular way so as to transcend the impossibility of being able to physically enter that space. An architectural model does not replicate the sensory experience of the full-scale architectural source, but it does provide a reference for triggering memory of experience or imagination, and it is indeed a work in its own right. If the notion of the miniature as a metaphor for interiority is to be embraced, then the contextual placement of the model within a gallery space may well heighten the experience of interiority and relationships of public and private. The architectural model that contains a micro-installation can also compensate for a sense of loss when an art installation is removed from an exhibition venue. Storage, too, becomes an issue for sculptural works, and an artwork and its crating can co-exist as an exhibit. As a method for recording and considering a series of site-sensitive exhibitions dating from 1998, architectural models containing micro-installations first appeared alongside the full-scale installation at Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin, in 2000 and continue to evolve with The Doll’s House project. The starting point was an investigation of the eighteenth-century print room at Castletown House, County Kildare in Ireland. The observation of deterioration and decay in the study of eighteenth-century architecture has led to the incorporation of these elements into the production of the most recent models. Identifiable models of specific spaces and installations at times give way to fragmentary works. These fragments and ruins parallel the piecing together of clues from centuries of lost knowledge in order to build an understanding of the life of Lady Louisa Conolly and her Castletown print room. If we experience life and re-live memory in a fragmentary way in the Proustian sense, then the ability to record experience in miniature and model form is a way to make sense of broken moments and experiences that can be absorbed within the field of vision, as a metaphor for understanding. Photography: Joy Hirst

As an artist, I take in concepts and ideas from various and diverse sources. One writer that I find most interesting in terms of constructing an attitude towards life and my own art practice is American mythology writer Joseph Campbell. In individual terms Campbell spoke of having one’s ears open to ‘the song of the universe’, and of artists as the mythmakers of our times. As part of my own ministry I am keenly aware of my own environment and how this environment can be made into a contemporary mythology. Previous works I have created include immediate and local references, such as elements of my own local aesthetic and spiritual edifice, the Queensland Art Gallery, as well as local exhibiting and personal spaces. I began formulating the basic concept of The Art Park Project during a visit to Movie World, one of several theme parks in the south-east Queensland region. At the time my art practice was focused on the Legends of art series, whereupon artists themselves were the focus of the work, mainly in the form of artworks that resembled mass-produced action figures and tableaux. Wandering around Movie World I could not help but think that much of what surrounded me was exceptionally superficial, and aesthetically and spiritually idolatrous: faux granite statues of Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny, retail outlets overflowing with mass-produced kitsch and overseas tourists posing for photographs alongside a man in a Batman suit! I envisaged a theme park that I would enjoy visiting, indeed, for me alone. This is how The Art Park Project came into being. I have as yet been unable to undertake extensive travels to visit some of the great art sights around the world. I therefore constructed a scale model of a theme park, which incorporated all of the art objects, art historical buildings and salient artist residences, gathered in the one place: The Art Park. Instead of travelling to several different continents and multiple countries I could here have an experience of seeing all of the sights in a single day, within the one theme park. Major features of the Park include reconstructions of Robert Smithson’s Spiral jetty, Monet’s Japanese bridge and Waterlilies, New York’s Cedar Bar (the haunt of the Abstract Expressionists), Grant Wood’s American gothic house, and Walter de Maria’s Lightning field. The Art Park also includes an art gallery filled with 1:1 scale genuine original reproductions of paintings from art history, as well as a cinema that screens artist documentaries throughout the day and feature films based on artists’ lives at night. There is also a feature stage, in which actors playing artists are presented creating their work in the manner peculiar to their own technique. As the Art Park is primarily for my own amusement, there is obviously no need to include local art references, as I am capable of travelling within Australia to visit pertinent art sights. For me, The Art Park Project also is a symbol of how a postmodern Australian artist views the world and delves into the nature of reproduction. Photography: Alasdair Macintyre

Monument to progressing thought (after Homer Simpson) is an attempt to locate what I regard as the most significant trajectory of sculptural investigation of the twentieth century, the ready-made, within the then contemporary debate surrounding the proposition to investigate the reversing of Australia’s rivers to irrigate the inland. The sheer absurdity of this knee-jerk suggestion was instantly reminiscent of something that Homer Simpson would propose and attempt to carry out, and certainly reminded me of The Simpsons episode where Homer’s failed attempt to build a BBQ is diagnosed/discovered as outsider art. His final artwork is flooding his town to make a new magical Venice, which is loved and enjoyed by all. Monument to progressing thought (after Homer Simpson) is my proposition to sculpturally commemorate what might have been had this reversal of the rivers proposition been allowed to develop just a little further. It is not difficult to imagine welfare recipients being mutually obliged to wheel barrow-loads of water to the mouth of this new attempt at water distribution to actually commence an inland water flow, and it seemed necessary then, as it does now, to have something celebrate both our complete inability to effectively plan for real and realistic sustainable and inclusive development in any way, and our proven ability to make stupid statements without actually thinking. D’oh indeed. Photography: Ashley Barber

Turbulence started as an idea to model the sky. To try and turn the sky into an object. To identify vectors and work ‘infinite’ space into a closed system. For this, I thought to make a sculpture in which interior spaces merge and change. I wanted the sculpture to be high and complex so that it never repeats itself as the viewer moves around it. This would actively encourage the movement of the viewer around and back and forth in order to perceive the relationship of parts and the structures that hold them. The time taken for this active reading of the sculpture also becomes an ingredient in the perceived unity, as a space–time continuum, like the time taken to read and understand a poem. ‘Shaped planes’ in space are perceived as other than what we know them to be. When they are looked at from angles other than at ninety degrees to the viewer, circles become ellipses, squares become rhomboid. The shapes of ‘spaces’ created by shape planes that are not at ninety degrees to the viewer, transform in an even more complex way; as the viewer moves the voids appear to expand or contract. The spaces also assume the colour and tone of the enveloping shapes with variation according to the available light. The above subtleties animate the architecture of the still form in which seven arcs, constructed from different centres, intersect one another. Making the sculpture involved juxtaposing shaped elements with intangible spaces, sensing geometric structure, scale, the force of gravity and directing the process towards an entity, an object of vitality that makes you feel something. When the sky became an object, the viewers’ position was on the horizon. Photography: Diane Larter

The use of wire combines the evocative power of drawing with the actual presence of form. The interior as well as the exterior is illustrated and a heightened sense of volume is achieved. Modelled shadow has been replaced by stereoscopic cues and contour section. The whole has a light theoretical cast; volume is illustrated with minimal mass. Photography: Mark Ashkanasy

Cross-reference continues a series of interventionist works that address the public, private and transitional aspects of both the gallery space and other public spaces. The defined architectural boundaries of the gallery site are ruptured through an open door, which not only expose an external environment but also provides alternative access to the internal exhibition. As participants of the Big Day Out music festival appear to examine the gallery, its art and its audience, the gallery public also experience an unexpected view of the music festival and its audience. The work not only inverts the space of the exhibition but the uncertainty created between the artwork/viewer is literally mirrored between the exhibition/external public space. The juxtaposition of two disparate sites and the simulated interaction between the participants of these sites aims to disrupt preconceived expectations of specific cultural and social contexts, and the way in which audiences are conditioned to interact and participate. The work consisted not only of the projection located in and beyond the gallery wall but as a temporal public sculpture within the Big Day Out site. A scale model of the gallery, inclusive of miniature art and audience, was positioned within the festival; the festival audience viewed the contents through a miniature doorway while their interactions were recorded through a camera mounted within. The location of this sculpture and its unexpected presence within a music festival context fulfils a similar objective to gallery-based work: that is, to disrupt the formal and participatory conventions associated with specific cultural and social experiences. Image: Installation view at Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art, AGSA Photography: Mark Bradley

It has often been observed that when westerners come to Buddhism, those brought up Catholic are drawn to the colourful Tibetan practices and those brought up Protestant go for the more austere Theravadan styles of Thailand and Burma. I’m an exception to that idea. Around 1997 I became interested in Buddhist thought. Inevitably, I thought about making work around Buddhist meditation practice, as many western artists have. Later I was more fascinated by the imagery that the texts bring up, and their political and social implications. The Buddha taught using strong visual metaphor. There are constantly ideas and images brought to mind for me that hopefully, and ironically, lead me into areas where words and intellect can’t hope to go, Nibbana! I later started thinking about the Buddha image itself. This face that I could rest in. What did it mean for me, as a westerner, brought up with the Abrahamic coalition’s distain for idols? And what of all those decorator Buddhas that pop up in design magazines? As Buddhism transforms into different cultures, what are western Buddhas looking like and how would they be used? What of their original eastern heritage? And how do I work with this as an art practice, in a very secularised art world? I looked at various media, from plaster to compost, in making Buddha forms. Then I stumbled onto an impression left in kitchen foil after covering a saucepan. Glad Foil led to Darrell Lea, which led to Italian Carcano foil. Making hollow forms led to relief forms, which led to mirrored forms. Mirrors are a primary metaphor in Buddhism, an example of seeing directly and clearly. This foil media resonates with me on many levels. It is seemingly ephemeral, delicate and evanescent. It has obvious cross-cultural references, too the Christian and the commercialisation of the Easter tradition. More importantly, though, for me it speaks to many facets of Buddhist teachings: impermanence, change, flux, non-duality (the illusory nature of conventional opposites), self-realisation, false sanctimony, and emptiness or corelessness. Ultimately the work resonates with my recurring interests in silhouettes, strong colours and the here-and-now of Buddhist temples. Photography:Lachlan Warner

My work usually results from a direct and labour-intensive process. Meditative process and tracing the time of creating the work are integral to an idea of direct experience, of being present, in the making and viewing scenarios. It could be termed ‘Slow Art’, in feeling the fullness of time in making, perhaps the work in turn slows down the viewer’s ‘normal’ experience of intersubjective time. To give oneself time seems gently subversive in a world that is continuing to speed up. Barcelona devotional was made in Barcelona during an Australia Council for the Arts residency. My research there included investigations into the use of pattern and repetition in both religious and secular works in light of an historical notion of mosaic work as a practice of paying tribute to the Muses (Protectors of the Arts) through a kind of devotional toil. This piece took the grid (mesh) as a starting point, which I saw as a metaphor for Barcelona as a prototypical urban centre. When folded, the grid becomes elliptical and suggests other less concrete connections, patterns and possibilities. During my residency I was intrigued by the proliferation of images of vegetal regeneration in public spaces, and echoes of these motifs emerged as the work took form. Photography: Brenton McGeachie