Ebb Tide (The whispering sands), 1998
pyrography on marine plywood, steel
variable dimensions
collection the artist

This installation comprises sixteen lifesize portraits pyrographically (hand-burnt) onto 5mm plywood.
These are British individuals who historically and subsequently impacted on Tasmanian Aboriginal people.
 These figures were placed in the tidal flats at Eaglehawk Neck, Southern Tasmania during November 1998
in the "Sculpture by the Sea" Exhibition.

These people were collectors; they accumulated material culture, stories, human remains,
anthropological/medical information and even Aboriginal children in the names of science, education, history,
anthropology and the increase of their own personal status and power.I decided (as an exercise and partially an exorcism)
 to collect these people themselves (as images) and reduce them to a nameless conglomerate mass just as they had enacted
on Aboriginal Tasmanians last century. Placed in the tidal flats for two weeks late in 1998, these figures submerged and
re-emerged with the action of the tides, the tide enacting the position of memory.  Placed as though they were wading into shore,
they operated as a form of mnemonic trigger.  Their emergence from the water suggested that their presence and deeds rests
still within our own memories.This work was a response to awakening ideas about our co-residency with the past, and to
questions arising about our avoidance and consignment of the past to a peripheral dimension called 'history'.