The Oracle Game
In recent years, our community’s confidence that global warming requires urgent action seems to have crumbled. We have become spectators to a game between contending “experts”. Each side looks to its oracles but clarity is lost in the babble of dispute. Who prevails could determine how life unfolds on our globe.
From the vanished world of the Mayans, ceramic sculptures testify to a ritual game played in the royal court to ensure the regeneration of life. Two teams, wearing animal headdresses and waist girdling buffers, attempted to bounce a large ball through an elevated stone hoop. The heavy rubber ball represented the sun and was never touched by their hands. The stakes in the game were high. Play re-enacted the Mayan creation story and ensured that the sun would continue to shine and crops to grow. Since human sacrifice was essential to these ends, the leader of the losing team forfeited his life.
Captives of the Mayans also felt this stern justice. In defeat, they were stripped of their elaborate earrings and had rags threaded through their earlobes to demonstrate their utter subjugation.
The spectators to the game in this exhibition are captive to competing views about global warming. Their ears bear fragments of the newspapers that help to propagate the contest. In contrast to the players, the passive spectators wear headdresses of the animals we have domesticated to provide ourselves with an abundant lifestyle even while knowing it weighs heavily on the planet. The standing spectators balance precariously on comforts that they fear might be at risk in the outcome of the game.
Above the noise of the conflict, we cannot hear the oracles. They stand aloof but we can see that they are not yet looking in the same direction.
Echoes in Form - 2009
A unique group of female artists brought Modernism to Australia between the wars. Parallels can be drawn between these women and their European counterparts of similar age. The sculptures distil perceptions of particular artworks with impressions of actual artists. These Australian artists may never have known the particular Europeans artist they are paired with but the synchronicity in their respective works creates the tangible connection that has been translated into these echoing forms.
Reorient - 2008
An intense response to the weather was explored through Japanese-inspired females figures. They were all named using Japanese words that describe aspects of particular seasons. For instance, Shimizu means Summer clear water, Kiri means Autumn Fog and Tsuyujimo means Late Autumn dew frost. An ancient Japanese poen linked the figures on a journey that spanned a full year from the "Hazy mist on a Spring day" to the ground being "covered with frost". The figures were constructed from layered, fragmented and imprinted shards of clay and the glazes evoked surfaces of lichen, rocks and even frost.
Mothers of the Revolution - 2007
Historically referenced female figures reflected the growing complexity of the world over the 20 generations. This stretch of time was punctuated with 5 key totems at 200 Year intervals, in the form of large chess pieces.
I appropriated images of ordinary women from significant historical artworks stepping back in time in 32 year intervals. Then I superimposed
references to the technological changes that characterised each of these eras.
Tilting the Brim - 2005
A brimmed hat in Bolivia indenties the woman as part of a cultural group. The women there live lives of hardship and poverty but their traditional clothing gives them their status and sense of heritage. In australia a hat if worn with much more fvrivolity. Education and living standards are generally nigh and person is able to pursue a chose career. The colour of particular austrlian birds defines each of the ceramic figures that represent australian women to symbolize this sense of individualityBalance - 2003
The Western Wolrd commands at 75% of the Earth's material resources. In the growing shadow of this blatant Consumer driven abundance, Indigenous peoples struggle to maintain lives rich in cultual inventiveness. There are at least 5,000 Indigenous cultures, some 300 million people. Althought it is only 5% of the world population they account for 60% of the World's languages and represent over half the intellenctual and spiritual legacy of Humanity. These women repesent some of those cultures.
