The other day the Fasham's crew and I installed my McClelland Sculpture Survey and Award piece, Sara Delaney - a head of her time - pictured above, she's looking a bit raw right at this moment, what with the freshly turned dirt, but I guess she'll settle in nicely before the show kicks off in November.
Placing sculpture in a bush setting always requires some very serious thinking because there aren't many good reasons to do it and the overwhelming permanent object precedents tend to be things like abandoned car bodies and junk, almost everything we find there implies neglect or loss. I'm intrigued by this problem, the McClelland style of bush is actually one of my favourite types of landscape, a fantastic mess which then reveals its points of interest as details. The more you look the more you see. For this sculpture I decided to avoid any chance that it could look as if there had been some civilisation in years gone by and make it look as if it was just a temporary visitor that could almost relocate itself at will.
Placing sculpture in a bush setting always requires some very serious thinking because there aren't many good reasons to do it and the overwhelming permanent object precedents tend to be things like abandoned car bodies and junk, almost everything we find there implies neglect or loss. I'm intrigued by this problem, the McClelland style of bush is actually one of my favourite types of landscape, a fantastic mess which then reveals its points of interest as details. The more you look the more you see. For this sculpture I decided to avoid any chance that it could look as if there had been some civilisation in years gone by and make it look as if it was just a temporary visitor that could almost relocate itself at will.
About a week after McClelland I installed this little sculpture on the 43rd floor of the ANZ building Collins Place, Melbourne. It was a very interesting commission from the ANZ bank, the title of the project was "Unique Mastery" and the idea was for me to "respond" to their ANZ Private brand. It also gave me an opportunity to use our last Cowwarr Art Space international resident, Iris Bendor, as the model. Title: i-muse, I think, I muse or as Iris starts with "i" and is pronounced as in "is", it could be iris-muse!
A new sculpture starts to take shape, Iris again - keep you posted, she's giving me quite a hard time at moment but I think we've turned the corner. I wouldn't have really known it myself, that's a common thing for me, but Don Burrows dropped in to the studio the other day and from his reactions I realised that much of what I've been trying to sneak into this sculpture was already there. Old sculptors and old Jazz musicians have a lot to talk about.
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