"As beautiful as the chance encounter on a
disecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella"
That phrase eludes to the shocking, the unpredictable
chance and the rupture in the everyday.
Most of the artists in this exhibition
are Tasmanian artists or South Australian artists
many of whom are involved in lecturing or
studying at the Tasmanian School of Art or the
South Australian School of Art here at
University of South Australia.
Much of the work in this exhibition involved
artists who are exploring with social interaction
engaging with members of the community or people who might
be responding to the artwork, not just in the gallery
but also in projects happening outside of the gallery.
I guess I don't work with pure chance
I kind of work with contrived chance
so I set up situations in which there is
an element of chance that will come into
the production of the work.
So, every day I was looking through the Mercury and I was looking
for five and seven syllable phrases
that had potentially a poetic quality to them.
I then looked at all the five and seven syllable lines
that I'd found and made combinations
of five-seven-five which is the
classic haiku formulation.
So, it was my encounter with
the chance material of the everyday
as reported to us by the newspaper.
The image of Aristotle's ballistics theory was represented
with a cannon and it was quite diagramatic.
His theory was that an object would be propelled in a
straight line out of the cannon
and then it would suddenly have a desire to return to earth
and that, the poetic nature of that
desire to return to earth was the
conceptual stimulous for the work.
Even though this installation is silent
the colour references the sound
of the ballistic voices which have fallen to the earth
and so therefore the installation is deliberately silent
because the comment that I'm making
what I'm expressing, the human condition I'm expressing
is that ballistic voices do fall silent
and a lot of what we may yell or shout
or whatever, with whatever fervor, usually
is never remembered and never recorded.
