National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | The National Sculpture Prize and Exhibition 2005
19 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 16 years ago -Audio guide to works from the The National Sculpture Prize and Exhibition shown at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 15 July – 9 October 2005
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Episodes
Geoffrey BARTLETT, Double self-portrait 2004
November 22, 2007 23:49 - 1 minute - 311 KBDouble 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 sca...
James ANGUS, Manta ray 2003
November 22, 2007 23:49 - 1 minute - 256 KBI 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 ...
Bonita ELY, Bonsai landscape 2003
November 22, 2007 23:49 - 1 minute - 377 KBFolded 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...
Craig WALSH, Cross-reference 2004
November 22, 2007 23:49 - 1 minute - 341 KBCross-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 publi...
David JENSZ, Unbounded space 2005
November 22, 2007 23:49 - 1 minute - 379 KBPhysicists 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 b...
Geoffrey DRAKE-BROCKMAN, Floribots 2005
November 22, 2007 23:49 - 2 minutes - 573 KBFlowers 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 si...
Glen CLARKE, American crater near Hanoi #2 2005
November 22, 2007 23:49 - 1 minute - 312 KBThe 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 e...
Juliana BARTULIN, Barcelona devotional 2003
November 22, 2007 23:49 - 1 minute - 341 KBMy 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 ...
Lachlan WARNER, Buddha of infinite directions 2004-05
November 22, 2007 23:49 - 1 minute - 413 KBIt 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...
Maria Fernanda CARDOSO, Woven water: submarine landscape 2003
November 22, 2007 23:49 - 1 minute - 374 KBI 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...
Mikala DWYER, Selving 2004
November 22, 2007 23:49 - 1 minute - 326 KBSelving 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 b...
Neil TAYLOR, Virtual hermetic 2003
November 22, 2007 23:49 - 1 minute - 278 KBThe 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
Patrick HALL, Stack 2005
November 22, 2007 23:49 - 1 minute - 288 KBMy 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 ...
Paul SELWOOD, Turbulence 2004
November 22, 2007 23:49 - 1 minute - 270 KBTurbulence 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 ...
Richard GOODWIN, Moth 2003
November 22, 2007 23:49 - 1 minute - 372 KBMoth 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...
Ruth JOHNSTONE, The doll's house gallery (boxed) 2004
November 22, 2007 23:49 - 1 minute - 310 KBThe 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 ...
Alasdair MACINTYRE, The Art Park Project 2002
November 22, 2007 23:49 - 1 minute - 387 KBAs 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 contempor...
Tony SCHWENSEN, Monument to progressing thought (after Homer Simpson) 2003
November 22, 2007 23:49 - 1 minute - 293 KBMonument 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 ...
Bert FLUGELMAN, Caryatid minotaur 2004-05
November 22, 2007 23:49 - 1 minute - 404 KBCaryatid 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, a...