Essay from the McClelland Survey catalogue 2005
Patterns of intelligent thought
By Robert Lindsay
Mathematically speaking, there seems an inherent fallacy in the Chaos Theory, that statistically sooner or later a fractal will repeat, and in doing so, creates a pattern. The rise of this pattern, no matter how extended, means the concept of chaos will disappear within a perceived order. History is also the art of pattern making, bringing order to a myriad of facts, both disparate and relative. History is a convenient set of generalisations authored to give insights to the past and help chart a path for the future to lay bare a pattern.
With the second McClelland Contemporary Sculpture Survey 2005 a pattern has been established for the ambitions of McClelland Gallery+Sculpture Park to be recognised as a major sculpture park that expands and records the story of Australian sculpture. The 35 works selected to participate in the 2005 Survey represent a cross-section of established, mid-career and emerging artists with works encompassing a variety of media and styles.
In the first McClelland Survey in 2003 the works were arranged along a sculpture trail in informal groupings throughout the Park. Two or three works were linked by a common thread that was sometimes philosophical, at other times visual, but with an implied link to the next grouping. A similar arrangement has been established with this Survey.
On the grassy expanse and lake area in front of the McClelland Gallery a commonality exists between Tom Arthur’s Waterline and Marie Sierra’s meme ii, for both artists seek to materialise abstract concepts about knowledge, while Nigel Harrison’s Spirit level, Andrew Rogers’ Wave, Endra Che-Kahn & Marco Mattucci’s Metamorphosis – and the path of unfolding diagrammatic plane, all exploit the formal device of elements of the work folding into itself.
Tom Arthur’s Waterline was first shown in the Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, where the optical illusion of the tightrope upon which the skeletal figure balances, broke the perspectival geometry of the Gardens. At McClelland Gallery the work is sited on the front lake with the line of the tightrope as it stretches from the island to the bank being barely visible. The bronze figure and its inverse reflection in the water create an ethereal presence, an analogy for metaphysical ideas and speculation which philosophers posit as the only true reality.
For over three decades Arthur’s work has conducted an epistemological enquiry into knowledge and how we acquire it. In an early work Basic Theological Tenant 1975 a skeleton levitates through a number of vertical glass sheets, the refractions and reflections of the figure in the glass superbly illustrating the subjective nature of perception; reality is only one of many points of view. The skeleton represents the ideal symbol for a universal beneath the particular; the skeleton has anonymity and is devoid of the skin of individuality, personality and identity.
In Waterline the skeleton is timeless; it also represents the disembodied nature of perception, the Platonic metaphysical view of the purest idea and perfection existing beyond time and life.
The colourful spore-like entities in Marie Sierra’s meme ii spread across the architectural façade of the McClelland Gallery, their replication and sequencing representing an analogy for the process of communication and adoption of new ideas. From the single germination to the full dispersal, the spores represent the development of an idea, its mechanism of transfer and adaption as exemplified by the concept of the meme. A ‘meme’ is defined as ‘a unit of cultural replication’, a term introduced by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene (1976)
to parallel the concept of genetic transference of biological information from generation to generation. In a cultural context a meme such as a custom, fashion or a tradition, is transferred by means of ritual and repetition. Marie Sierra’s oversized spore-like fungi represent the biological equivalent of the meme, although their exact role seems ambivalent: potentially benign, the spores may live in a symbiotic relationship, or they may be malevolent; a potentially lethal prognosis may emerge with the contamination of a new attitude or idea totally annihilating an alternative view.
From the investigation of the transmission of ideas to the science of seeing, John Nicholson plays with the ephemeral nature of colour through a systematic investigation of the electromagnetic spectrum. He is interested in light and how it effects and produces colour and has described his work as ‘playing with the field of abstract minimalism’. He uses a variety of coloured and clear plastics formed into simple geometric shapes, which are ideal for his experimentation in forming and dissolving colour effects produced by projected, refracted and reflected light.
From the time of Sir Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) investigation into optics and his scientific explanation of refraction, of splitting white light into its rainbow spectrum, there has been a scientific overlay in the investigation of colour theory. In Solid light extraction John Nicholson combines multiple stripes of coloured plastic to form a wall of colour, which is both partially reflective and iridescent.
The tripartite of equivalences continues in the next three works where the mechanism of the fold is a common thread. Using a number of discrete sculptural elements to complete a narrative, Endra Che-Kahn and Marco Mattucci in Metamorphosis–and the path of the unfolding diagrammatic plane transform, as if emulating the Japanese traditional art of Origami on a grand scale, two-dimensional planes into three-dimensional objects. Through an innocent series of ‘folds’, and apparent in each stage of the transformation of the objects, the form of a gun emerges.
The theme of weapons of war has appeared in the artists’ previous work, such as Highly Strung Contraption Mk IV + Missed Opportunity in which a mock war catapult and payload is played out across its site. The gargantuan scale and the unusual techniques used to fabricate their sculptures give Endra Che-Kahn and Marco Mattucci’s work a humorous satirical edge that allows them to present significant social questions.
Nigel Harrison’s massive steel sculptures, such as Spirit level, echo a sense of the grandeur of the land. His inspiration is the ever-changing coastal shoreline, particularly the energy and massive surges of the ocean waves breaking onto and receding back from the rocky escarpment of the coast. Sculptures utilising traditional materials such as steel through the demands of volume and weight must conform to the physical laws of nature and the principles of balance and construction. The arm of the massive curved cylindrical form in Spirit level provides a horizontal eyeline.
This stabilising element, whose judicious arc encompasses and bridles the surging forms trapped within, allows the sculpture to evocatively convey both a sense of the power of the ocean, with its ever-changing ebb and flow, and the continual confrontation with the bulwark of our eroding coastline.
Andrew Rogers’ Wave continues his series of works which appear to deny the weight of the bronze with the ribbed contoured form apparently floating above the ground. The detail of the ribbed contours with their green patination contrasting with the black metallic underside of the bronze helps to create this levitation phenomenon. The eye is attracted to the detailing of the ribbing which emphasises the undulating rhythmic quality of the surface. Andrew Rogers’ abstract works look to the repeating patterns in nature for inspiration.
In his Rhythms of Life series he attempted to capture the dynamic sense of life and energy within the organic unity of nature. In these totems of life the individual elements convey movement with sweeping tendrils and evocative organic curving loops reaching into and claiming their space. In recent works such as Wave, Rogers has slowed down the apparent movement to a slow, inevitable and unstoppable swell.
Phil Price is interested in movement that is kinetic rather than implied. The blade of Ratytus is wind powered, its technology and inspiration coming in part from the aeronautical industry and from Price’s study of the flight of birds. In the tradition of mobiles, the random moving blade creates different and ever-changing patterns and configurations. The title Ratytus is derived from the species of ratite or flightless birds such as the emu, ostrich or the rhea, for the work, no matter how aerodynamically efficient, will remain earthbound.
The next group of works re-invigorate the traditional skill of carving in marble. As a prelude to the works sited on the bush track at the rear of the gallery is Alexander Seton’s The bean bag suite (an artist’s conceit), which is a celebration of the artist’s virtuoso technique using the traditional sculptural material of marble. While the bean bag is a symbol of the casual lifestyle, it here presents the familiar in an unexpected context. The bean bag suite sited in the Sculpture Park gives a contemporary measure to the 18th century Romantic vogue for garden follies,
such as faux antique ruins or architectural anomalies of scale, which were designed to amuse and deceive the eye. Seton’s deception is his verisimilitude; the humour is the surprise of finding a trendy patio of bean bags in the garden, and that the cold hardness of the marble denies the visual expectation of accommodating softness. Seton’s humour is also embodied in his subtitle (an artist’s conceit) which puns with the idea of deception or the con, the seat as the subject, and the vanity of the artist’s intention to deceive. The principal title alludes to the artist’s ongoing focus on furniture and bedding, objects which allow him to experiment with the numerous
the features of the monumental head. As a disembodied shard, it appears to be broken from a larger statue, it represents an emanation from another culture or another aeon.
Philip Cooper’s Homo cosmographia also has echoes from another time, while seeking to find an analogy for the Plutonic dualism of the body/mind, the rational/empirical debate which resonates through the ages. The physical level of existence is represented by Cooper in the solid carved wooden head, it remains earthbound, its striation embodying different levels of physical reality, while above an inverted schematised linear frame charts cranial contours, as if to symbolize the cerebral and the metaphysical. The cranial matrix of lines emulates, and is derived from,
Cooper’s admiration of 14th century celestial globes which were developed by medieval astronomers in an attempt to represent the cosmological patterns of the heavens. These celestial globes represented medieval man’s desire to create a physical representation of the abstracted hypothetical world and to understand its patterns.
Lisa Roet’s White ape represents a hypothetical parallel world where the hierarchy of human dominance within the animal kingdom has been reversed and the ape is the dominant species. The aggressively oversized formal portrait bust of White ape alludes to the portraiture tradition of regal and fascist statuary, which was used as a focus of veneration and to symbolise the power of the state. This ‘hypothetical’ has fictional parallels in films like The Planet of the Apes (1968), which emphasised the biological closeness of primates and humans, and speculated on the possibility of a different evolutionary trajectory.
For over a decade Lisa Roet has researched her Pri-Mates project, presenting the outcome of her enquiry in works produced in a wide range of media including bronze castings, video installations and drawings. White ape is, by size, the culmination of these works; it alludes to a dominant culture that can intimidate by its grandeur, and as a consequence humankind must accede to another order.
David Wilson’s work Long time twilight is sited at the apex of the McClelland Sculpture Park bush track. It stands like an enigmatic totem of warning, setting the tone for the next group of works which abide within the bush. Wilson’s sculptural trajectory breaks the traditional mould. He has moved from the role of a fabricator using sheet steel and welding techniques, to that of a modeller with the textured expressionistic forms of his aluminium casting camouflaged beneath dappled patterns of paint. The hard-edged geometry of his early sculptures which exploited industrial sheet steel,
welding techniques and a rust finish, evolved with the use of a hydraulic forge and power grinder, into acquiescent, free-formed twisted and folded shapes imprinted with the mark of the artist. Long time twilight has a strange other-worldly appearance. There is a familiar yet disturbing incongruity in the crustaceous or bark-like appearance of the work. Its shapes seem oddly botanic, reminiscent of curling leaves or slough from another natural order of things. As an eerie totem on the bush trail it creates a strange, surrealist atmosphere not unlike the bizarre effect of Alberto Giacometti’s Femme égoréee 1932 (Museum of Modern Art, NY).
As if guarding the bush trail, the first of three hunters and the haunted themed works, is Anne Ross’ Pack of dogs. Half hidden in the bush, her ‘alert but not alarmed’ canines subtly impinge on the unwary intruder with a realisation that the benign bush has been transformed into their lair: you are the trespasser in their territory; you are the involuntary violator of their land rights. Ross has always been interested in venerating the common place. In her works, everyday objects are often increased in scale and placed in incongruous contexts – the norm becomes surreal and the surreal becomes the norm.
Dogs represent for her a way of reintroducing nature into the urban environment. They are, she observes, often cast in the role as the endearing ambassador of the animal world, their anthropomorphic potential to represent a matrix of projected emotions being their raison d’être. However, this potential in the bush may become ambiguous and blurred, with the feral and the domestic in competition and the outcome uncertain. Within her canine menagerie there are nine dogs in packs of three, five and a loner who emits an audible growl when approached, each cast in a variety of metals giving a sense of individuality within a limited range of variety.
Further down the bush track Louis Pratt’s Trapped presents a strangely distorted anamorphic figure helplessly snared by ropes dangling from a truncated tree. There is an unreality in the victim’s plight. The ropes enhance the distorted body, evoking associations with the medieval pastime of the hunter and the prey. The disturbing unreality of the scene is further heightened by the elongated alien-like quality of the figure. Pratt has long admired Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors 1533 (National Gallery, London) which features a distorted anamorphic human skull in the foreground. Although its exact meaning is still unknown,
this enigmatic symbol of medieval thought is often seen as representing the archetype – materialization before God created the Universe. Within the contemporary electronic cyber-world, the programmer designs on a computer. The figure in Trapped is a high-tech polymer creation originally designed on computer as a two-dimensional image and realised in 3-D. Its alternative reality has its genesis in electronic games dominated by themes of chase and kill and the alien figure is stretched and elongated as it breaks through from another reality. As the ensnared prey awaits its disturbing fate, the implication that the predator-like pursuer is nearby heightens the sense of anxiety.
From the hunted to the haunted. William Eicholtz’s early work played with accepted cultural and sexual mores, combining erotic male nudes within the tradition of Western art with the conservative pastorale tradition of Australian landscape painting. Eicholtz’s jumbuck sits passive and traumatised in the bush. Eicholtz has focused on the Australian merino, a symbol of past rural wealth and power as well as being an enduring image from Tom Roberts’ Shearing the rams 1889–90 (National Gallery of Victoria). He also draws upon the story of a lost merino ram that was discovered in 2004, ‘shaggy and ensconced in five years of unshorn fleece,
this iconic Australian image is rediscovered and brought into contemporary conscience. He sits as a curious sentinel, at odds with the present time, but acknowledging his history and looking to the future.’ In Eicholtz’s jumbuck the artist has transformed its golden fleece into a coat of oak leaves studded with acorn-like rhinestones, a satiric reference back to medieval European mythology when magic and, as Sir James Fraser noted in his great anthropological treatise The Golden Bough (1890–1915), the first gods, tree gods, inhabited the great oak trees.
Crossing the bridge over the billabong along the bush track are two works of botanical whimsy. Stephen Birch’s Fungal displacement – magic fantastic mushrooms, and a field of realistic but oversized wrapped artichokes in Yvonne Kendall’s About artichokes and other hearts. Both works exploit the technique of casting. Birch’s anthropomorphic mushrooms with their happy smiling faces beguilingly speak of childhood fantasy, of Disney’s Fantasia and Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Birch uses humour as a cloak to distort reality for within the work there are a number of spy-holes through which, with a sequence of lenses and mirrors,
the surrounding landscape can be seen from odd and distorted points of view. For Birch the mushroom is an ‘unstable signifier’ of decay, fantasy and innocence and first appeared in his Westfield (2003) installation where human-sized wild mushrooms created a colourful psychedelic wonderland, but where video monitors betrayed a wasteland of decay with a life-size transparent figure trapped in a hallucinogenic nightmare.
There is aura of domestic fecundity and warmth in Yvonne Kendall’s About artichokes and other hearts. The work was created while she was pregnant and the ancient status of the artichoke as a fertility symbol particularly resonated with her. The artichoke, like the rabbit which featured in an earlier work Fertility Monument 2003 that abounded with references to the Easter bunny, chocolate eggs and the abundance of northern spring, continues her allegiance to symbols of fertility. This theme is projected by Kendall in About artichokes and other hearts, not through scale but quantity, with a field of artichokes amassing into groups that have distinct personality traits.
These anthropomorphic projections onto the artichoke, echo Kendall’s interest in the life cycle of nature noting that the focus on the inner soft heart of the artichoke as an ancient delicacy, has often denied the full cycle of the plant which culminates in a beautiful flower.
Murder in the Sculpture Park: clues abound, a life is cut short, and within the spirit of reality television you can solve the mystery. Carla Cescon’s A murder script in stone plays with the traditional family board game Cluedo, where deductive reasoning wins the day. It echoes the popularity of forensic investigative television dramas, a postmodern mystery in which you are the reader of the ‘text’. Cescon, like Stephen Birch, takes her cues from contemporary culture; with Birch its the disorientating spores of a technological overload; with Cescon its a nostalgic re-creation of parlour games, of order and chaos, but a chaos that does not threaten the social order.
In A murder script in stone we look downward to the clues at our feet. This omnipotent gaze is also found in Cescon’s earlier work where, with a cast of thousands of superbly crafted miniaturised mutants and medieval grotesques, she populated crowd scenes as if from a Gothic novel. In these works homage was paid to an unseen drama happening off-stage, similarly in A murder script in stone, we look upon the narrative and wonder about the plot.
Emerging from the bush, into rational open space is Ashika’s Chess mates. The Queen and King are emblematic of the whole. Chess is a game of intuitive decisions made within mathematical probabilities, a world of action within the grid of rules and deductive abstract reasoning. Chess is often regarded as the ‘thinking person’s IQ test’, the action is cognitive, the philosophy is the game, and the truth is what you make it. Ashika’s monumental stone carvings also echo his spiritual empathy with nature. Their form seeks a universal abstract totemic language, enhanced by the combination of the raw natural textures of stone highlighted against highly polished surfaces.
He first experimented with environmental sculpture whilst living in the Yukon with the Athabascan people in the late 1970s, and this experience echoes in the monumental scale of Chess mates which occupy the site yet relate to the environment. Chess mates embodies both the truth of the stone and the trust of the quest.
Dealing with the abstract, the intangible, and the absence of light, is the raison d’être of Darren Davison’s homespace. Initially trained as a photographer, Davison is conscious that the effects of controlled light captured on film as the photographic rhetoric of the 20th century – a language of the ‘real’, has been potentially subverted by the revolution of photo-shop digital fiction. homespace makes nothing (i.e. the absence of light) real. It is the ultimate postmodern symbol, something defined by its absence. Entering the darkened interior space of a domestically-scaled shed, a ceiling of microscopic holes admits external light to create a starry firmament which,
combined with its reflection on the floor, destroys the visitor’s sense of light and space. It acknowledges what John Milton called ‘making darkness visible’. This work has an affinity with John Nicholson’s Solid light extracted which, as noted earlier explores the properties of white light and its refraction into the colour spectrum.
From the time of Pythagoras and the Milesian school, philosophers have sought to explain the world in terms of mathematics, to unearth the patterns of the universe. Within this tradition Adrian Page looks for the mathematical structures in nature, which he translates into contemporary structural theory using analogies ranging from honeycomb cells and the geodesic dome to the crazing stress pattern of ceramic glazes. In Wall-veil Adrian Page’s architectural structure plays with concave/convex planes. It declares its internal ribbed structure and external gestalt surface. Its source comes from within mathematics and geometry; its inspiration comes from the pattern and sequences of nature;
its stainless steel components pay homage to the computer and laser technology; and its assembly to the hand and eye skills of the artist.
Laurens Tan is likewise fascinated by geometry and the mathematics of recurring patterns and probabilities as presented in nature and architecture, and the hypothetical patterns perceived in games of chance. These he aims to synthesise into a new architecture of public forms. Hell bent has a veneer of purpose, its patterns having been superficially derived from the geometric designs on playing cards. However the patterns also seek an authority based on the mathematical design of the universe. The geometric shape of Hell bent is based on Sierpinski’s Triangle (formulated by Waclas Sierpinski in 1916) in which the mid-point of each side of a triangle circumscribes another internal triangular and so on,
thus creating the simplest example of a fractal. The incised motif on the sides of Hell bent is based on the decorative pattern on a standard Queen’s Slipper playing card, while the repeating ‘8’ insignia is the Eight Hour Day emblem of the 1890s.
Roman Liebach’s gargantuan Wharf spears seeks the sublime while honouring the integrity and history of its source. These hundred year old trees, capped in steel, rammed into the seabed to form the pylons of a wharf, have re-surfaced as a sculptural colossus. With incantations of their previous existence, they echo noble products of nature subjugated into the service of industry, only to return as talismans to evoke an appreciation of the grandeur and beauty of nature. Liebach has consistently worked on a grand scale, the complicated logistics of his work camouflaged within his minimal interventionist philosophy which embraces a veneration of ecology and the environment.
His recycled timbers always retain the evidence of their past, a quality which in Wharf spears is further enhanced by their massing within an enormous steel vessel. This majestic vase ambiguously intimidates by scale yet, with a touch of humour, reduces the reading of the work to a pencils-in-a-jar arrangement, albeit that of the gods.
The architecture of Jarrad Kennedy’s Court has a more mundane source; it is based on an oversized milk crate. The milk crate, like the shopping trolley, is often used, abused, and abandoned with no reference to the actual owner of the object; it is stateless outside its normal precinct. Its increased scale is humorous, but demands to be taken seriously and inverts the original purpose of the crate. Kennedy’s Court pays tribute to the punk aesthetic of unpretentious materials and understated technique. It is constructed out of discarded and recycled building materials and suburban detritus, found in the Langwarrin area where his family lives.
The milk crate’s height of 2.4 metres is the standard ceiling height of the estate houses which are rapidly filling the area. Court further acknowledges its suburban heritage, for its title refers to the estate developers’ fondness for naming estate streets with the fashionable appellation of ‘court’. Kennedy has an ongoing interest in public space and public monuments, particularly art monuments, and how they affect space as well as people’s interaction with them. While his earlier works experimented with play equipment, this later work Court represents a grand but useless architecture shelter.
The next group of three, Jessie Cacchillo and Craig Waddell, working as a team on Ab-stracter, Richard Goodwin’s Imago and David Howell’s HQ, again demonstrate a tripartite commonality, for although each is working with a similar subject – the theme of vehicles, their choices and treatments show the imaginative variety of possibilities.
Punning on the idea of abstraction (and perhaps a parody of Abstract Expressionism) Jessie Cacchillo and Craig Waddell have covered and almost totally obliterated the lines and form of an antiquated farm tractor under a simulated painterly impasto surface, transforming the object to a ghost of its former identity, to be read principally in terms of colour and texture. The acrid artificial colours of purples and blues have the effect of abstracting it away from its role as the rural workhorse, a symbol of agriculture labour, to a fantastic whimsical cartoon of its original self.
By contrast Richard Goodwin’s Imago has the ethos of a high-tech vehicle, a hybrid amalgam of a shape reminiscent of a monohull of a formula one racing car with additional aerodynamic wind foils, struts and braces. Crafted in steel, it has the sophistication of state-of-the art design and contemporary industrial research. Philosophically it is a prothesis, a mechanical add-on for man to travel at speed; for the artist it represents an exoskeleton, an aid, but also a protection against the demand of a futuristic role for man to compete in the imagination of the future.
six separate truncated parts, scaled up to monumental proportions and fabricated in steel to challenge the traditions of heavy metal sculpture in Australia.
James Parrett is another artist challenging the traditions of heavy metal sculpture. His work Make your own takes as its starting point his frustration with attempting to assemble plastic do-it-yourself model toy kits. With its wooden frame, marine ply, screws and varnish finish, the sculpture has more affinity with yachting hulls than traditional sculpture. It has the evidence of its creation as a postmodern acknowledgement of the context of the origin of the idea and the qualities of the materials used.
Greg Johns looks to the landscape, its mass, patterns and physical laws, for the genesis of his abstracted geometry that forms the basis of his heavy metal sculpture. The bird-like /humanoid forms in Seaing the land, feeling the land with their elongated beak-like proboscis atop a human silhouette, fossick and explore the ground beneath. The four have gathered into a circle, beaks raised and lowered, in an apparent sequence of genuflection to the choreography of some ancient mysterious ritual whose observance raises a sense of disquiet about the origin and purpose of these totemic sentinels. The rusted steel patina echoes the colours of ancient rock surfaces, and engenders a sense of dignity and a sense of times ancient, the visitation of spirits of the land from another time.
Donna Marcus’ work The twelve apostles has an edge of mid 20th century consumerism. The title refers to the southern Victorian geological pinnacles which through erosion have been separated from the rocky coastline and stand proudly aloof from the shore. From nine years of collecting a wide variety of used aluminium vessels including cooking pots, pannikins and frying pan lids, Donna Marcus has selected a group of spun bowls, patio planters and ice buckets to assemble into eight totems. The replicated anonymity of the forms is evidence of an industrial manufacturing process and the multitude of items proof of the casual disposable ethic of a consumer society, not to mention an enduring element of kitsch.
Threaded on a central axis the circular forms of The twelve apostles create an intriguing pattern of concave/convex contours, their scratches and weathered anodised finishes of reds, greens, yellow, and a variety of battered colours in between, are monuments to our contemporary secular god of consumption.
From the artificial to the natural: with a deep reverence for nature and a sense of the spirituality embedded within the landscape Peter Blizzard creates works which seek to elevate nature within steel shrine-like structures. His stone menhirs act as a conduit for a deeper appreciation and insight into nature and our relationship to the environment. Atop the high altar of Halo moon shrine Blizzard has placed an almost perfectly round, pale rock which is encircled by a yellow brass band. The symbolism of the circle as eternal has connotations of traditional iconography. A halo or nimbus originally symbolised the power of the sun god and the source of all life, and later in Christian iconography, the source of divine radiance.
The shrine is an evocation of the Moon as the earth mother whose waxing and waning represented the cycles of life.
Kate Cullity, with the assistance of Ryan Sims, has directly engaged with the cycles of nature creating in the installation Sclerophylla chiaroscuroides, a work which includes young eucalypts planted in a schematic profile of a leaf, an image which is echoed in a series of aligned metal perforated screens which show an enlarged microscopic pattern of the cellular structure of a eucalypt leaf. The arrangement of the screens resembles the leaf profile and their orientation within the Sculpture Park and echoes the ability of the leaf to orientate its edge towards the sun for minimum moisture loss.
From the grand design of nature to the intrinsic authority of the machine, sculptors have used the full gambit of inspirations as the genesis of their works. Paul Hay’s Field and Nigel Helyer’s Spinner continue a tradition of merging the machine, pseudo or actual, into sculpture. The machine comes with the pragmatic authority of technology and the aesthetics of industrial design, both of which engender veracity and access to a wider context beyond pure aesthetics. The rationale of Hay’s brightly striped towers and suspended ring is deliberately ambiguous, although it invites speculation that it is possibly a high frequency radar facility or a satellite relay terminal. Its conspicuous industrial paintwork has been designed for maximum visibility and carries the implication of potential danger on impact.
There is a clinical almost ominous precision in the engineering of Nigel Helyer’s Spinner with its stainless steel components and perfectly sequenced concentric circles aligned around an aerial-like axis, meticulously tensioned by a set of guy wires and shackles. It has echoes of a high-tech marine transponder, the beauty of its design and craftsmanship is apparent, but its exact purpose remains ellusive. The enigma of the purpose of Spinner is further exacerbated by numerous sets of iridescent purple feather-like fan shaped appendages which imply a mysterious functionality. In previous works Helyer has used a sound element in an effort to more fully connect with a wider narrative, but in Spinner it is the speculation about its purpose that engenders flights of the imagination.
The McClelland Contemporary Sculpture Survey 2005 demonstrates the dynamism and inventiveness that characterises contemporary Australian sculpture and the pattern of intelligent thought that underscores the artistic endeavours of the selected artists. The exhibition thus provides the visitor to the McClelland Gallery+Sculpture Park an unparalleled opportunity to see a diverse range of sculptural practices and to contemplate and enjoy the works within the beautiful natural environment of the Park.
Robert Lindsay
October 2005.
