Rail, 2000

How they got here, 2000

and how it's been, 2000

rail, 2000
paint, wood, aluminium
2930 x 780 x 10 cm
collection the artist

rail is another wall-piece, a representation of a public space with a private story.
It is about Government buildings with their pale-green-to-waist-height-walls.
Walls which measure you as you walk along their symmetrical system of sameness.
I hold this rail and green wall in my memory- but cannot for the life of me recall ...
Does it come from a school, a hospital, a Hall, where ?
I have recreated it as a slice of time and place, a piece of my mind's jigsaw
awaiting to fit back in somewhere beyond its current trigger-zone.|
The particular rail has been compressed, pushed into a v, mutated to fit into this
78 cm wide segment. It is me, in the endless working against conformity within
the everyday elements of which I am impossibly made.

How they got here, 2000
bricks, mortar, cast iron plaque
840 x 700 x 465 cm
 

I found this old plaque in a storeroom - it is a temporary loan.
What has held me is the wording - firstly that it is headed DORSET. 
This is what the marauding English renamed my tribal territory,
the country of my ancestors - the Trawlwoolway people of the far
North East of Tasmania. People from Dorset, England were
threatened with Transportation for Life for Injuring this Bridge,
yet, unaccountably, this bridge's mission statement was removed
and also transported over here. In this sense, the bridge cannot
lose sight of its tormentors - they are eternally  in this together...
I think that this two piece work is partially my consideration
of the plethora of reconciliation bridge walks sweeping the nation.

and how it's been, 2000
bricks, crushed abalone shell and mortar,
whole abalone shell, photograph
815 x 1320 x 230 cm
 

and how it's been is my personal revisiting of the site of childhood.
I have remade a wall, a wall which my mother and I stood against
and looked away from when I didn't know what remembering was,
was let alone forgetting to remember. This act of remaking this wall
today in the presence of my mother is about facing the past.
It is about concealment and containment of Culture yet also
about how Culture seeps through the cracks and re-emerges
scarred but strong. The Stories are in the gaps, the traces,
the silences and apparent absences.