2009-2010
Composited photographic image, ink-jet printed on bill-board synthetic canvas, 300 x 450cm, imaging: Christian Capurro.
Exh: in an installation with Monument for the flooding of Royal Park, a frieze of 46 inkjet prints, and Music for an imaginary launch, in collaboration with the composer Andrew Byrne, 6-minute stereo recording of a score for eight hands on a prepared piano and one voice (piano: David Shively, Alex Lipowski, Richard Carrick, David Schotzko; voice: Anna Schoo), at Shed 6, as part of Last Ride in a Hot Air Balloon: The 4th Auckland Triennial, curated by Natasha Conland, also including Nick Austin, Mahmoud Bakhshi, Richard Bell, Johanna Billing, Martin Boyce, Gerard Byrne, Shahab Fotouhi, Alicia Frankovich, Shilpa Gupta, Sharon Hayes, Robert Hood, Marine Hugonnier, Shigeyuki Kihara, Laresa Kosloff, Learning Site, Jorge Macchi, Alex Monteith, Mike Parr, Philippe Parreno, Garrett Phelan, Bundith Phunsombatlert, Olivia Plender, Walid Sadek, Tino Sehgal, Michael Stevenson, Tove Storch, and Zheng Bo, 12 March - 20 June, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o T?maki with Auckland Triennial Partner AUT University in association with exhibition partners Artspace, St Paul St and The George Fraser Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand.
Nardoo flag-wave is an off-shoot of Monument for the flooding of Royal Park. The flag being waved is a degraded image of a red field of dried out nardoo, which typically follows a desert flood. The image has been 'composited' from a set of photographs taken in Royal Park, Melbourne.
Monument for the flooding of Royal Park is an elaboration of the artist's book of the same title into the form of a 15 metre frieze. The work describes a proposed monument, which focuses on nardoo, the plant which the 19th-century Australian explorers Burke and Wills furiously consumed during their final days around Cooper’s Creek. The Yantruwanta people had introduced the explorers to the habit of making cakes from nardoo sporocarp, who failed to observe the correct preparation of the seed, mainly due to Burke’s antipathy towards Aboriginal culture and his hostility towards any reliance upon it. Without roasting, the sporocarp contains high levels of thiaminase, which disables human digestion by destroying Thiamine, ultimately resulting in apoptosis, the self-programmed death of cells in the body. Burke and Wills both starved even as they spent most of their final days preparing and consuming copious quantities of nardoo cakes.
Monument for the flooding of Royal Park is a proposition for the scattering of nardoo sporocarp throughout Royal Park, a vast Park in Melbourne's inner north where the explorers' departure point is commemorated by a small cairn. In the event of flooding, these sporocarp become fields of nardoo fern. As the flood waters recede and the plant dries out, they become vast fields of intense red, a carpet which temporarily covers the expanses of the Park. This drying out again disseminates the sporocarp, which can survive for up to 30 years in the ground before their growth is activated again by floodwaters. In this work, the proposed Monument is described in parallel to a sequence of archival photographs of different Burke and Wills monuments in and around Melbourne (including images of the famous Summers’ monument in its various locations around Melbourne).
Music for an imaginary launch is a collaboration between Tom Nicholson and the NY-based composer Andrew Byrne and was conceived as a work commissioned for the occasion of the launch of this imaginary monument. It was written by Byrne in response to the artist's book as a score for eight hands on a prepared piano and a recorded female voice, and was exhibited as a looped 6-minute recording playing from a PA system on a small stage.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||
The artist's book Monument for the flooding of Royal Park was published by Schwartz City in 2009.
The artist's book was an elaboration of a video of the same title, which was shown in 2008 as part of the Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture.
The frieze form of the work was also shown in Animism, curated by Anselm Franke, at Extra City and MUHKA in Antwerp, which opened in January 2010. The frieze was first shown in Italian-English bilingual form in the exhibition Still vast reserves at Magazzino di Arte Moderna in Rome in September 2009.
Nardoo flag-wave was also exhibited as a Type C print, 100 x 150cm, in the exhibition Still vast reserves II, at Gertrude Contemporary Arts Spaces, Melbourne, in August 2010.
Click here for the entire text of the video Monument for the flooding of Royal Park.
[ home ][ cv or download as pdf ][ links ][ email ]