Tuesday, July 7, 2009

THE COLOUR OF SPACE - Level 17 Artspace, Victoria University, 17/300 Flinders Street, Melbourne, 7 July-17July, 2009

'The Colour of Space' was an exhibition involving video work by Rose Anne McGreevy, paintings by Barbara Halnan and sculpture by me.

It was the first time that I had constructed one of my large cardboard and wool works - in fact the construction technique came about by the fact that I wanted to show a large piece in Melbourne and had no way of transporting it.  

The original idea was a piece of serendipity...  One night I drove past the car park of a storage warehouse on Botany Road - there is often leftover junk in it - instead of taking things to the tip, they leave them there for people to take away.  This night there was a pallet load of flat-packed boxes...I said to Mick, "I think they were boxes"...he agreed...I said, "I can probably make something out of them"...he agreed.  Next morning he came home with a surprise - "They're cubes!" - only he could realise how excited I would be about that...we ended up with 3 and a half thousand of them...

I knew that I wanted to paint them and build a large cube, but didn't know how to put them together.  I didn't like the idea of gluing them, then having to destroy the piece when the exhibition was over; as I knew I would have nowhere to store a large sculpture, let alone transport it.  I briefly considered staples, but couldn't make it work.  I then thought of wool...problem solved...the cubes could be tied up like presents, then each cube could be tied to the next.  At the end of the exhibition the wool is cut and everything flattened again for transportation and storage.  I had already been making cubes and wall works with wool, so it all made (a strange kind of) sense.  I also exhibited the long crocheted 'Stripe' that I had shown previously at Carriageworks.


'Large Cube', cardboard, acrylic and yarn, 165cm x 165cm x 165cm, 2009





'Stripe', yarn, 1300cm x  15cm, 2009
 


demolishing the cube...
And if you want to waste some time - here is a jigsaw of the 'Large Cube',  go on!, you're on the internet, you're already wasting time!...

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