Love[f]Art #09 | Alex Seton

Hosted by Amanda Love, the LoveArt podcast brings listeners into direct conversation with contemporary artists, extending the work of the independent art advisory, LoveArt, based in Sydney, New York and Athens.

The series draws from Love[f]Art, LoveArt’s ongoing program of intimate, in-conversation recordings with artists, originally conceived in 2020. Filmed in the most unlikely of settings—the guest powder room at the Love residence—the project strips things back to a one-to-one exchange, focusing on ideas, process and the conditions that shape contemporary practice.

This episode features Alex Seton's There’s No Place Like Home, an installation that brings together several works from the artist’s four previous exhibitions that collectively contemplate memory, forgetting and loss. In this intimate setting, Seton (re)presents works that tell his personal memories of growing up off-grid in the bush near the Wombeyan Caves.

Recorded in September 2022, at the time of the work’s installation, the conversation offers a direct insight into the thinking behind the piece, and the broader concerns that underpin his practice.

Seton is represented by Sullivan+Strumpf.

Additional information, including the video version of this podcast, is available here.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:08

Hello and welcome to this ninth iteration of Love Art's nano project space, Love for Art, where we multitask this purpose-built isolation chamber, our mini-guest bachron, now almost returned to its proper use, as a kind of bois de belize. And our aim is to counter the increasing size and complexity of much contemporary gallery and museum practice with explorations that are of a different scale. Here on Galligal Land, so I do pay our respects to the Aora Nation and all their elders. We investigate the tiny and the one-to-one to showcase and now thankfully exhibit the strength of current artistic expression, which by necessity is both innovative and ingenious. And so, in this sense, well, huge. I'm Amanda La, and it's my great pleasure to introduce La Lart's latest installation, There's No Place Like Home. It's by a prominent young Sydney sculptor, Alex Seaton, who's represented in Sydney and Singapore by a Solomon and Stamp Gallery, and whose practice incorporates sculpture, photography, video, and installation. First, identifying and examining problematic ideas and concepts, and then giving them form, increasingly with political and or social context. He's exhibited extremely widely, both nationally and internationally, including significant solo exhibitions at Unit London, Golben Regional Gallery and Newcastle Art Gallery, the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, McClellan Sculpture Park and Lyndon Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne, and Rockhampton Art Gallery, and also Hazelhurst Regional Gallery. He's also been included in a number of important group exhibitions, including the regionally toured exhibition Save Space, which was 2018 to 2021. Hope dies last, Art at the End of Optimism at Gertrude Contemporary in Melbourne in 2019, Countercurrents at Zamstad Museum in Adelaide in 2017, the Kochi Miseris Biennale in India in 2016, and Kunsten Festival Watu in Belgium that same year. Also Conflict, Contemporary Responses to War at University of Queensland Art Gallery in 2014, and very importantly the Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art, Dark Art, curated by Hugh Miskovich at the Art Gallery of South Australia in 2014. Included among his numerous awards and residencies and art prizes is the prestigious Sovereign Asian Art Award, which he was the first Australian to win in 2020, and the Morden's Fellowship to the American Academy in Rome, where he spent much of 2019. And just last year, the Australian War Memorial awarded him their major sufferings of war and service mission. So you'll be able to see his large-scale installation, which he's balled for every drop of for every drop shed in Anguish in their sculpture garden next year. And of course, he's collected widely by major institutional collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, Art Bank, the Art Gallery of South Australia, Newcastle and Bendigo Art Galleries, the Danish Royal Art Collection in Copenhagen, and the comprehensive Alvinova Art Park, which is in New Hampshire, USA. And as you would expect, numerous other private and public institutions. So and welcome.

SPEAKER_00 4:12

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_02 4:13

Where are you? I I understand that you've gone home. You've abandoned your studio because it was too noisy, too much work in progress.

SPEAKER_00 4:20

No, I uh sent everyone away. I thought we'd all have an early lunch. I'm here at the studio. Oh, you are at the studio. I never made it out of here. We've got a bit of a deadline today, just um a little bit of an installation tomorrow. So uh just finishing up some work, being sure that's all detailed. So we're here in the dusty studio.

SPEAKER_02 4:39

Now, Alex, I'm gonna have to get you to speak up in Cyborg's loud waterfall to my left.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

And it's it's um deliciously noisy.

SPEAKER_00 4:48

Okay, perfect. I didn't realize you were gonna do it from inside the nanospace.

SPEAKER_02 4:54

Now listen, we'll we'll we'll come back to talk about um there's no place like home, which is your installation here in depth later. But um I have to say that that despite having known you and your practice since, well, I think at least I first noticed some of your early appearances in sculpture by the sea, I had no idea that you grew up in the country, let alone in the Wambian area of New South Wales, where I, as I said, I've spent many childhood hours picnicking in those caves.

SPEAKER_00 5:25

Yes, so so it's um it was one of those um things that um it's a I think like many of the children I grew up with, there was always a mix of both city and country, um, in the sense that uh in the late 70s, my parents were part of that Californian do-it-yourself early 70s movement, um, where it was sort of inspired by some writings about Thoreau and Bolden Pond, that sort of thing, the idea of a conscientious objection, uh, a conscientious living inside nature, but also away from the society and participating in the society that that you're in, um, and when you participate in it. Um, and um my parents uh were both in programming, and my dad had been working at CSIRO and had moved over to IBM. And um, my uh my mum was working, having come from Egypt as a programmer for her older brother at birth, deaths, and marriages. So they're programming a lot of the um New South Wales state records, and um the uh yeah, they mess and married at like 21. And I think my mum said, Oh, I have this money, we we should just find a place. There was so their one requirement uh when they were hunting up and down the coast of New South Wales to raise a family, was um have a waterfall. Have a waterfall. And it's uh waterfall. They they got they found their waterfall as 21, 22 year olds uh down there.

SPEAKER_02 6:58

Now, well, uh as I said, we will come back to that later because it really, I mean, clearly it's nice to have that in mind when we go through some of your uh subsequent work because clearly that's set the scene for uh much of your practice, whether it's um dealing with inside that kind of paradigm or looking outside or moving outside from that paradigm. And I I suppose one of the first major exhibitions that I saw of yours was at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery in about 2013. And we found a very informative video that you made at the time on YouTube where you speak very eloquently and demonstratively about the process within your practice at that time. And because it's only about five minutes. Would you mind if we if we played that?

SPEAKER_00 7:52

Um please, I haven't seen it in a long time.

SPEAKER_02 7:55

Okay, and then afterwards we'll get you to take us through the exhibition itself. So, okay, let's do it.

SPEAKER_00 8:04

It's a very anachronistic act to be carving barble in this day and age. Roughing out attempts to basically reveal some of that process and is the reason why I would be working in such a medium. The inspiration for roughing out first came to me in the middle of last year. I was doing a residency in upstate New York. Certainly got me thinking about my practice as a whole. That problem of the wow factor of Mali. How does that rub up against the concept? Why is there something very attractive about notions of the handmaid? And very particularly, why is this this demand by the audience for the this idea of labor? Why do we need an overt display of effort? And it seemed to me to be something along the lines of and notions of dedication, of that integrity that seems to be bound up with an overt display of effort and labor. In the recursive time machine's work, I've had my hand digitally scanned and then printed in the latest 3D printing cornstarch plastic, guided by me. I'm using an old pantograph machine, which is an old, outmoded machine in the gallery as a performance. I will actually be with my hand, I will, as the artist's hand, will be guiding the stylus of the machine over the digital printout to reproduce and cut many little versions in marble, little analog versions in marble of but mechanized reproduction. And it's obviously an outmoded technique to use a pantograph machine to reproduce an object. And that's interesting to me because, of course, it's looking at the idea of uh the anachronistic act. The uh there are so many different uh methods we've evolved for ourselves in an approach to the true the three-dimensional object. And uh the the hand of the artist, and where does that lie in that space when you're moving into a territory where it's almost purely of the mind? Okay, so what you're looking at here is my work called Half. And I've started with a block of classic statuarium. It's a very um classic um material uh for carving, as in um the Italians highly prize it and they nickname it milk, which for my purposes, I've carved from this block. I started off with a single block, I've cleaved it along a natural floor and carved a classic milk, Australian milk carton, just an ordinary cup. And you can see that the volumes are half full, and from the upper half of this block, from all the material that came around to whittling down these two objects, we've created uh a stack over here of glasses full of the dust from carving that object contained within these glasses here. 315 of them. This work here is called Glory Home, and it's a raw slab of Wombian marble with what is a rather um traditional minimalist exercise in um creating a negative space within a form, and then me taking the core drilled from that center and putting it on the ground in front of it with the powder and water from the process of drilling it. By that, I can actually recontextualize this minimalist object into and imply quite cheekily a much filthier narrative. But then by the same token, actually ask questions of the idea of an artist's validation. Are they purely satisfying themselves, or they actually have a dialogue with an audience, somewhat on the other side? The alchemic cycle as a process is simply me getting a block of marble and I carve it down to dust. I take the dust and I caught that dust in a kilt. Now mixed with a careful composition of the rubble from the origin initial carving, so this is still using the same material. Um, I actually uh make it into a white cement and I pour into a mold of the original block, revealing the original block at the end, and which at that point the video loops and I start the carve again. Marble, in and of itself, is dismissed. Simply one element in a long narrative of this creation and this almost act of Sisyphus. It's he goes, push the rock up the hill and down the hill, and then come back to the beginning again. So the alchemic cycle is actually puts the focus back on the process itself, that that process of uh a series of actions taken upon material, but the discovery is back in and the emphasis becomes on the labor, the labors undertaken and the choices undertaken by the artist to get it transformed into another state. So this piece here is called the recycled bags. Now, together they form a whole work. What I'm doing is actually presenting the actual object, the real object, in this case, a bag of rubble, of marble rubble, right beside a simulation of that object. Now, this garbage bag is full of the rubble from the process of carving this. So this model has been made whilst I'd already begun the carving. So there's chicken and egg question with this piece. The garbage bag, uh, as you see it here, is in its roughed-out form. There's still remnants of the original marble block. Eventually, I'll affect textures of the coarse linen surface of this bag, as well as uh the seams as well, and right down to every gentle little fold as it is affected by the rubble that will be contained even within the top of this garbage bag. I'll actually take rubble from the process of carving this and pop it back into the top here. In my work, I um often will create these illusions, these soft illusions. And it's not about being able to create an illusion, but rather take a concept and then undercut it in some way. And so illusion gives you that ability uh to undermine audiences' expectations of an idea. I know that through my familiarity with the medium, I know that this thing that this sense of stone is being absolute and concrete is actually very untrue. It is incredibly malleable and incredibly soft in so many ways. The attraction there is to whittle away at this idea of absoluteness. The term roughing out is actually the process of the beginning where you rough out the form. And so it's the planning stages of the idea. And um the planning stages of where I go next is what I'm playing on there. The idea that um I'm also breaking the bounds of what is completely finished object. And these works have far more of a dialogue with the audience about certainly in this case, chicken chicken and egg questions about process and where an audience begins and where the object ends, because this heavily embols in those questions. So these aren't finished objects, they're roughed out. They are they're broken the the constraints of that initial idea and are still running wild around in in certain circles around the audience.

SPEAKER_02 16:38

So uh that that uh video, which I think's a terrific uh video, it was made in Arsenal 13, which was just before your Hays or Hertz exhibition, which I think was called Wrapping Art. And I thought if we if we looked at some of the works, if you could take us through that exhibition, um in the we can look at the works you actually made and presented in in the light of what you've said um in the video. I'd I I really love the sense that you get an enormous amount of satisfaction from identifying a problem or a conundrum and then sort of exploding it and then resolving it to your own satisfaction and presenting it as something for the audience to engage with.

SPEAKER_00 17:24

Yeah, absolutely. Um I have to say that I haven't seen that video in a long time. And uh everything he said in there was great. 2013, uh 2013, Alex, I was afraid was, you know, maybe a little dumber. Um, but uh yeah, the only thing I would add is what I've learned since about material and particularly in nature in in in in reflection to the environment. I think uh as it's sort of uh different things I've now learned about uh the ethical um aspects of uh material. But uh otherwise, uh yeah, it's actually 2013's roughing out is one of my favorite shows that I've ever made. So I'm glad you brought this video.

SPEAKER_02 18:07

So we've got we've got some, I think we've got some um images of the show um where you can see some of the finished pieces, not not all of them referred to in that video, but I particularly like your idea. Well, I like the idea of the anachristic act, which is the hand of the artist, and the alchem the alchemic cycle, which where you reveal the process through the work, and then um like the idea of like taking a concept and then undercutting it by creating an illusion. Um, so therefore you're you're holding the idea of of truth accountable, um or how you're exposing its its valuabilities, and also your notions of audience engagement in terms of where the object ends and where the audience begins.

SPEAKER_00 19:07

I've always had that in my work. I think my first uh shows and my first artwork that I ever created, um, you know, post uh College of Fine Arts, uh were replicas, marble replicas of gallery benches, that sort of thing, or a marble couch at sculpture by the sea in like 2004, I think it was, that um played with the art objects, the formal art object, what is perceived as the art object, placed on the landscape, you know, and um commands to the audience, um, who were confused about purpose and intent. But uh, it had said, I think that one said, this is no time to sit around, get up and enjoy the day. And people were launching themselves and whatever was the soft-looking couch, that sort of stuff. Um, where a play in in that interaction between audience, the artwork, and the artist. Um, I think I for my first solo show I created a suite of beanbags that had been randomly kicked upon a grid. Um, action, gesture, and intent seemingly removed. But of course, it's all part of a larger magic trick to be delighted in. And uh the, you know, I've run, I just quite honestly, I've run at the the junction of an idea, those conundrums, and tried to give them voice. Because, of course, as you can see within my practice, I've run away from it at times and I've run toward it at times. But say with that the image you have there of the recycled bags, um, there is a conundrum to be had there. There is also a delight in the Trompe loy. Um, and then there's um an engagement with the idea that process can tell a story almost better than the results. And so it's always been performative to an extent. Uh, all of my most finished objects, my most resolved objects, still have a performance uh to them. Even the bench right in front of you right now, Amanda, um, with the droplets on it, and we'll come to that, uh, still is performative and it's about a uh almost a recognition of the theater of the object.

SPEAKER_02 21:24

Well, actually, I think the notion of the theater of the object uh brings us neatly into your your uh your installation in just the next year, 2014, for the Adelaide Biennale, which was called Dark uh Dark Heart, um, which I which I do feel was a tour de force in all of the issues, especially theatricality, but alchemy and magic, and then again um surrounding engaging surrounding political issues. Um yes.

SPEAKER_00 22:00

I would not have been able to do that show if it weren't for the conscientious analysis that I did in 2013 in Roughing Out. You could see this is executed without irony, but I think I might have been tempted, when challenged about Dark Heart in 2013, to be more sardonic or cynical about um, because uh we were all charged by Nick Mitsubic, uh now the director at the National Gallery, but formerly of Art Gallery of South Australia, and he was the curator of the show that year, to discuss some aspect of Australian culture at that time. And of course, uh I I made these 28 marble life jackets talking about refugee and asylum seeker policy in Australia. Um I think this is just uh uh maybe 12 months before, well, when presenting this, this is still 12 months before Operation Sovereign Borders had come into effect, but um, where the issue of um boats not being settled uh and being pushed to Manis uh had already been coming up. And I had read an article about uh a boatload of Iranian, they they now think Iranian uh refugees um who put out a main day distress call out somewhere out near the Caucasus Islands and uh 28 uh life jackets washed up ashore a couple of days later. And though I found that very compelling and moving in a in a much more formal kind of way in the in in the when I thinking about it artistically, you think about the tomb of the lost soldier. Uh that you know, when it struck it struck me at the time that you couldn't uh no matter where you stood, you couldn't help but be moved by the fact that, you know, there was always a a question of legitimacy, or lots of discussion in the press around the legitimacy of a refugee. Whereas um you're under undercutting all the the dinner table discussions, all of the um uh editorials in the press, I kept coming back to this idea that, yes, but somebody died trying to have a life like mine. So who am I to uh ignore that or discuss the title of the work, by the way, was I need my and then and that ended up becoming the title of the work, exactly. And uh you you you know you couldn't run it that sardonically. They couldn't run it and run it that ironically. You had to be plain spoken to be criticizing the privilege that Australia was enjoying, yet not extending to others who were directly asking for their help. Now, if I it's obviously a very different kind of show to the evolution from the year before, but could not have been done without it. So I run at uh classical tropes in there. You have um maybe in that foreground, you can see it. Uh you have like uh, yeah, that's uh that's actually a take on the uh the dying slave, uh the classical sculpture that has the uh almost contraposted twist on his uh on his sitting down on his hips. Um, you know, for knowing uh my art theory and history, having done that at the College of Fine Arts, not fine arts, um not fine arts studio, I should say, you know, I was able to link to my uh art history education and to a modern child pairing in one side, um, to intimate we even with these, you know, very uh simply put, modern life jackets, uh, where you see them as vessels as you if you empathize even for a second, you feel the weight of these, um uh that you could put one of these on was the feeling that you needed to have when standing in front of these. Um ideas, you know. I was very hesitant uh when going into it with whether this was going to work. And I mean, I was being scared right throughout 2013, thinking, is this gonna actually uh work, or is this gonna seem like um I'm making fun? Uh and I really wanted it to be sincere uh and come from the right place ethically.

SPEAKER_02 26:03

Um I felt um the essence of what just going back to what you said then about um some of the other resonance that the work has, I mean, I read that as essentially, and when I saw the work, it was that you were essentially putting the humanity back into these objects that were just the remains of an event. And then you couldn't help but look at this installation and feel, you know, compelled by by the human the human loss and the human nature that was involved in it.

SPEAKER_00 26:42

Oh, great. I'm very glad that that comes across. And is it about the relationships between the different types of jackets that actually does that the figure the figuration of it, the openness, like uh where you feel where the shoulders are, the body, the figurativeness of it all comes hopefully comes across. The um yeah, I I think I changed my view of the work a few years later and uh felt a little embarrassed, probably unjustifiably.

SPEAKER_02 27:13

Was it when when images of the Well where um you know a number of artists like I Wei Wei and that were were sort of using images um slight as art but in a different way.

SPEAKER_00 27:26

Was that any yeah, it was exactly exactly right. Um in 2015, at the height of the crisis in Europe, where you had uh 200,000 uh was it oh um a a week uh pouring uh over the um borders of uh uh Greece, Turkey, and um you'd have images of these huge piles of life jackets. Uh this work looked like I had you know, I was just simply lifting from that. And uh when Iwei lies down on a Turkish uh shore um and tries to rip and says uh and and acts like the the dead Turkish boy uh lies there as if dead, um, without the permission of the parents, ignoring his own position as an artist and the privilege that comes with it, and particularly as a big international artist, it's so on the nose, it becomes so on the nose. Uh and I think I said so at the time.

SPEAKER_02 28:26

Well, I think from this part that that's a a larger issue too, for I mean, if you're um an artist working, Australia is a marginal um location, and I mean you were dealing with this issue in a completely different way. But once a central, the the same issue gets dealt with through the center, then I think you are the margin, the person working at the margins always feel feels their work will always be viewed through that lens, which um to a to a greater and lesser extent is is that I mean that's what we have dates on works of art, I suppose. So it's inspired by the art gallery of South Australia, so it will always be there with that date on it and um on those circumstances.

SPEAKER_00 29:11

Yes, I I I I feel um it's uh one of my best works now, and I know the context and um motivation that I had at the time and and feel okay with it. And um I there's um yeah, there's been quite a bit of critique of the work over the years, and uh one thing I would say is look at the title and look at who that's directed at. It's directed at us and our own privilege and the ability to um, you know, it's been uh I think critiqued for uh being able to stand in front of um it with a glass of champagne and move on to the next thing. But that's the very thing I'm accusing the audience of doing.

SPEAKER_02 29:52

Absolutely. Now, and I I think um I did mention the work, you know, the the notion that there was such a psychological register around these this work. And I feel that you really took that um to new heights, um playing with the same, not playing, but working along you've certainly set the same theme. But um with within sort of later works, I mean, I say if we look at um what just that notion of psychological register, was that something that you aspired to always, or that you this work made apparent that you could achieve um just because of the perfect storm of subject matter and your you know your increasing virtuous facility process-wise?

SPEAKER_00 30:41

I I think it was a combination that's I think you hear me mention it in 2000, the 2013 video, where uh that in the analysis of what it is about uh say virtuosity. Um my conclusion was I think in that at that time was oh, the video is um uh yeah, when you show process, you become fascinated with process. Well, what is that? It actually is sincerity, um, hard work is seen as, oh, there's a there's a commitment, but is there's uh credibility there that people can buy into. Um I still think the conclusion I I come to then that I apply while making these. And that, oh well, no, no, no. I um I think it was Christopher Allen or some random critic um had said, oh, why not just put real life jackets down? I was like, Oh, that's that's kind of the point. Is the idea of have we shown any commitment? That would be cynical, you know. Have you shown any commitment to the emo the idea of the emotional state of, you know, do we actually want to move people and argue uh efficiently? You know, journalists and a good um uh investigative journalist piece can move policy at times, but art does this other thing where you can emotionally move people and hopefully motivate uh to action.

SPEAKER_02 32:11

Absolutely. Um it overcomes compassion fatigue. Now it seems that um as problematic as it was, this subject matter obviously continued to haunt you and inspire you um over the next couple of years. Because if we look at um refinement and last resort, which I think you began showing at the end of 2014 and continued through a number of regional gallery iterations into the next year, um you're touching and dealing with that subject matter, but um we move in in a different way.

SPEAKER_00 32:44

Yeah. I think um uh one thing I didn't answer in your previous question in terms of uh the psychological, psychological tenor of my approach. Um I was raised when we moved to the city. Uh, we were lucky enough to be country kids with uh scholarships to St. Ignatius College Riverview, where I was fortunate enough to be taught by some amazing Jesuits. And Jesuits have a lovely humanist point of view, which I have to admit, despite being a good atheist now, uh that humanist point of view really does rub off. Uh it's about I have all of these skills and I I learn um and educate my myself and I'm educated. Well, if I don't put them to any purpose for my fellow human being, then what am I doing? Um and the uh the body of work I had produced before roughing out was looking at the notions of uh nationhood and in particular the Australian flag or the flag as a concept. And I did that for many years, between 2009 and 2013. And it was in that that uh I think got me the invitation to the uh Adelaide Biennial in the first place.

SPEAKER_01 34:05

Right.

SPEAKER_00 34:06

And it's uh my approach then was to ask questions, and I got bogged down in the idea that I had or or was making in this very particular material that doesn't matter what the um message might have been, people can get over the skill, and hence roughing out was uh pulling it apart of uh my medium and an analysis of that medium, and I needed to express that and show that I was doing this conscientiously in this day and age. So when I when you when you come to talking about uh uh refugee and asylum seeker policy, particularly of those times, I do see these works in a very particular light. Uh because of the dialogue that was happening at the time, was emotional, um it was a highly fraught uh issue, if you recall. Uh dinner parties were a light with the conversation around it. I mean, it started with the children overboard a fair many, many years ago, uh, as in really in the media ignited again. Um and yeah, when when you come to 20 uh 15, 2016, um it's all over our media. Um, so a way of being simply put was to run at the tradition of the material as well. This has uh all of these works you're showing are well, not all of them, but say this jacket you're showing is in uh traditional memorial Italian marble. Um it's uh the material of choice for a lot of funerary and staff, funerary statutory, etc. Um to to simply go it that way, to reduce it down to um a much simpler um uh uh uh objects than multiples and go one life jacket. One life jacket was poignant, doesn't uh having done 28. And then the invitation of course here is to uh it's it's got an equation to a traditional portrait class, but it is empty.

SPEAKER_02 36:15

I like your comment that um some of these sculptures, you know, are both rock solid and full of pot air. I thought that was um a very good succinct um or pippy way of expressing many of many of the things you've said now.

SPEAKER_00 36:34

Yeah. It's uh there's a I've always delighted in this idea that there are no contradictions there in in art. There's just no in a in an artwork. There's just choices you the audience hasn't been forced to you know make yet, or the the audience hasn't made yet. There's just a challenge to see if you could see it one way or you could see it another. Um and I've loved doing that. Certainly the hot air of the uh I think I was referring to the the the all of this discussion around Australian exceptionalism, and you have that uh last resort uh inflatable palm trees there, you know, you're very much running at skewing an intense uh Australian privilege.

SPEAKER_02 37:20

And also with uh the palm trees obviously skewer any notion of sort of worthiness out of work. I mean, you you know, you you do always have a sense of play, and there is a sense of irony when it's needed. And you know, the the books on one level could also be read as worthy, but you can't because of the other references. You lay lack the palm trees that you're laying on top of them. And I wonder how if we how is the work, how was the work um exhibit uh like received overseas? Because you did take it overseas to um Gallery Paris Beijing in 2015, another or albeit in a much more narrowed version. I think the the exhibition was titled The Journey. How was that exhibition received over there?

SPEAKER_00 38:03

Yeah, I and and that's uh that really does come down to timing. I feel very differently about that particular show. Um I really love that show, but the in the during the timing of that September um of 2015, uh there were people camped in tents down the end of the street from this gallery. Um so we ended up closing it up early and um going in helping down the road uh in a kitchen. Um but this was uh to say, you know, uh there was a lot of um negative discussion about refugees just as a negative influence. But the idea that we are all refugees on some level, we all understand in our narrative structure going back of old, back to the Odyssey, the idea of the hero's journey. The hero's journey, what is it to be a refugee, but simply someone looking for a better life? That is the hero's journey. The hero's journey is a realization and uh a searching for something better. Um, it's common to all of our stories. Um, we are all refugees in that in in that sense, and we're all looking towards something or on this journey. Um, and even if at the end it's all smoke and mirrors, like it is in lots of the uh famous heroes' journey uh stories at the end destillation, you know, because Australia is not perfect, for instance. Um there is still a journey for each and every one of us to undertake. That was kind of the approach uh here. Uh done in more sort of uh larger, abstracted poetically uh uh objects. So you have a like a marble boat engine there. Um that actually came from the story of um uh the the Vietnamese Australian uh governor who um was you know fleeing as a Vietnamese refugee in the early 70s. Uh they were coming towards the shore in northern Queensland, and two men in a tinny drove their boat out and helped a bunch of his swimming relatives and himself on shore and said, Welcome to Australia. He always remembered, oh, I got this wonderful welcome. Uh and uh I always thought I must give back one day, and that's why he entered into public service. Uh I loved, I've always loved that story. And the idea of that little Yamaha run about uh titty boat engine uh was why I ended up selecting that that that that particular form to play with. Because I'm often obviously selecting from um the field of already ready-made objects to replicate in some way, to tell the story if it resonates in a very particular kind of way. Uh so very careful to select uh the subject of the individual sculpture uh uh as my um as my model.

SPEAKER_02 41:00

And uh and of course uh this exhibition was, you know, take again taking you know your practice to a sort of much more universal level. Um and yeah, I mean I so uh moving on to uh we'll move away from from this topic slightly because if we move on to um similar but paper armada, because I love the way in in that work that you very simply and depthly expressed the bureaucratic power game that all refugees have to negotiate, um, which was also, I think, in 2015, and which is obviously a very busy year for you, Alex. Um in paper armada, it's almost as if this work is the answer to a kind of cryptic crossword question. I don't know whether it's the question or the answer. And again, it's your chicken and egg, which comes first. So maybe you can talk about paper armato for us a bit.

SPEAKER_00 41:56

Oh, as you say, as you say, which comes first? The um the will of the people to move politicians to action. Um at the time, uh politicians were claiming to have uh the will of the people on their side. Um I think the Abbott government at the time was taking a victory lap uh about the over 400 uh votes that they'd turned back or turned over to uh Manis Island. Um yeah, it was uh a work motivated by the politics of that moment um and the news stories of that moment. Um yes, it was a change that only only comes from all of us. And then there was um, and well, if you've even pulled through right to today, there still are uh refugees uh families who have been torn apart by policies set in motion then. Um and they are stuck in a bureaucratic hell trying to unpick that. Now there's been some victories uh in releasing uh refugees from uh on but what many multiple year incarceration in Melbourne hotels, etc., since then, which is good. Um, but we're talking about um when I make this particular piece, I'm motivated by the idea of uh it's we it's we as a community that are responsible. Uh and it's really, really easy to make it uh someone else's problem, this idea that it's a a nebulous bureaucratic uh someone else. So no one actually is particularly answerable.

SPEAKER_02 43:48

So in it in this sense, each each of these boats is a margin as a as a marble, you could say a concrete mark in marker for each of those turnbacks, and then all the other. with people that were turned back on and ended up refugees. So it's a concrete um marker for that. That's great. Um so then the next year we we moved to India because the next year 2016 you're in the Kochi Muris Biennale, Miseris Biennale. Now I I attended the first um iteration of that Biennale in 2012 and I can thoroughly recommend it for any anybody as a venue but for I mean as it's a as a biennali venue and the city itself. I think in 2016 Citizen Shetty curated it and it was around theme with forming in the pupil of an eye how where did they see your work and how did you come to be included in that thenali and and and and make this work for it?

SPEAKER_00 44:54

So I met the I met them I met the curator in Hong Kong actually at uh Art Basel in Hong Kong and uh we'd gotten to talk and and he'd seen images of the Paris work and was very specifically interested in that um but also the the final piece the uh in that to show you it the uh the the journey in parry at Gallery Paris Beijing um yeah the discussions with gallery parry beijing um had had had first started in 2012 um I was always ever going to give them this show about the the hero's journey and I did not predict what would happen when I presented it and those events would have almost overtake it to the point where the presentation of that show was almost on the nose um and I always felt a little uncomfortable about that at the time and since but uh the at least at the um at the Biennale there was going to be a lot of yeah the Kochi Biennale was an amazing experience there was lots of discussion around art I think at the time of presentation of this work um I was Iwei had actually just uh released a picture of the uh uh uh of him on the beach uh pretending to be the the the drowned Turkish child uh in a uh misguided act of solidarity I think um but it was particularly on the nose there was a lot of discussions around the ethics of art uh because there was uh a lot of talk about uh the idea of uh uh tragedy porn the idea that the contemporary art world um full of uh you know political issues and and all with all the good intent in the world uh were coming to take life jackets off uh refugees in actual need you know things like that yeah and too many documentary crews crowding up the the shores of uh Greece and Turkey yeah um there was a chance to properly discuss that in a good and public way I think that was there was an excellent discussion lively discussion around that uh during that bien early I really thought it was very um it was an exceptional moment. And well and the work exact the work here can you take us through this the actual piece that you had there yeah so I had in the past used as a device of and of course it's more um of for my mind the it's it's very theatrical to remove the the figuration uh but uh looking at um all of the um uh the just the idea of uh finding a place for yourself like this is the distillation of the the hero's journey there's always a moment of crisis there's almost almost a moment of crisis for um everyone you can see the the that body for all intents and purposes could be you it fits everyone it's it's ghost like it's uh but it's under the tarpol and so many of the Australian boats um their own the only shelter uh was tarpoland um the idea uh in representing word refuge is just just the more universal discussion around being able to look uh for a safe harbour there's a lot of discussion of where was safe harbour in the world yes well I'm a very again I'm a huge psychological register and very poignant and compelling work.

SPEAKER_02 48:41

I think it's also interesting because that same year you showed you had an exhibition called Cargo at Solomon and Strump. And I feel perhaps as a result of everything you've you've told us, I feel that your work seemed to become even more nuanced and kind of referentially layered, um sort of more abstracted in a way and I mean what's the word I want to say um say scope it became sort of more scopic in the sense that it's inwardly and materially dense but conceptually quite expansive. If we take a look at words from that show cargo um perhaps you can explain I don't even know if that's the right take on on on what you were going through but the work is decidedly different in its exhibition.

SPEAKER_00 49:28

Yes uh so I think that what I was going through at the time was this idea but uh I had made a lot of work critiquing Australian privilege um a lot about the sort of universal um and I thought I I think after that I turned to the more personal and I had been looking around at the life that I lead and here at the studio by coincidence all my clothing uh had graduated to the studio to become dusted clothes to get ruined while carving and I had seven years of my own clothing uh all built up and uh I had a studio very briefly somewhere else um next door to a studio that had um that actually was for a sort of recycled clothing assortment bay and they used to send uh uh crate loads of Australian clothing secondhand clothing to places like Nigeria and Kenya and they were being turned back at that time and I was talking to the uh the fellow that ran that and discussion of uh like uh the ethics of secondhand clothing and our own uh like charting our own story and so I thought I'd I'd actually chart my own there's there's seven years of clothing little things that you recognize but also the enormous uh sort of humanity in taking up just the sheer amount of objects that we surround ourselves with uh to make up what one individual life. But it was I have to say it these these these are marble it's not it's not your actual you've actually carved um yeah so just to yeah so I so I end up uh carving them in a uh sort of totems to a single life um uh or tributes I should say is a better word uh this uh these are pieces that uh mark the standard size bale in the metal frame and I've sort of used that I wanted to convey volume but of course carving takes a long time uh and is can be slow and fastidious and so I used the more abstracted uh metal frames to to mark the volumes of the standard size um clothing bale. Yeah I was yeah I know you I know I used that time and time again uh throughout this series. Uh it was a moment where I was stepping stepping back and uh questioning my own impact uh not only on the environment what a a lifetime's worth of uh using things and demanding things be of service to me objects be of service to me.

SPEAKER_02 52:28

Yeah well that you know there's that whole concept revenge of the object Baudrillard's revenge of the object that sounded nice I said that's great that's a great article actually great read. Um I always refer to it when any appliance breaks down when I come home from being away or something I call it revenge of the object. So you're being beholden to eat yes exactly I suppose this is a is a good time actually to speak uh speak of the central material of your practice you didn't namely marble um because I know that in in 2020 which was during lockdown you conceived and exhibited an exhibition called the Great Escape in Golven which I I love the whole nature of that you obviously hold up everyone was conceiving the Great Escape but you applied it to your own practice which you which you severely obstructed in this um exhibition and at the center the central channel of this exhibition was the landscape and the material material of the Wambian caves area in Pori, which is near Chiralga, which is I understand we've discussed where you grew up um and where by the way I'm I'm sure you've been to Hugh Wennebourne's great pub and and uh restaurant there. Um but what I wanted to know here is um whether the sense of the the sense of tribute in this work um to Marvel or is it is it sincere or is it ironic there's well you know the great escape.

SPEAKER_00 54:04

I mean it's got many um even based on what you just you've been telling us today it had many possible uh meanings and I'm sure you meant every one of them um there's oh I actually I think um uh when I say many possible meanings are usually it's usually um a junction of two it's it's very rarely uh more than that I mean there's meanings that you gathered but the way you force a choice to be perceived one way that's in contrast or even in opposition to the to another um great escape in particular um does mark a turning point it was it's sort of a new body of work that I'm still on now that's uh again that's prompted be by the beginning of the introversion started at cargo where I'd always dismissed uh my own story as being pretty generic uh white Anglo-Saxon Australia um but there's also things to be learned from it um mistakes made for instance um you know I grew up in a 1980s uh in at least in at uh primary and and high school where the his history books you know didn't go past uh back past 1788 kind of like a Captain Cook you know I grew up with the oncoming uh 1988 bicentenary being a really big deal and they really couldn't talk about anything but celebrate uh uh Captain Cook and flamealization um the you really but you were really aware of that I growing up in the in in country Channel Australia you're really aware that you'd ask a question yeah but what about before that you put your hand up no adult could answer the thing the to grow up in Australia is to be aware of an absence to be aware of an absence of uh of knowledge whether it be willfully forgotten or or casually forgotten um it uh you know and that's the true interesting nature of that rectification that's happening now in the last 10-15 years really this wonderful learning about an opening up of our history um and it's it's with great delight that I enter that so look going back down to one being caves the idea of a great escape you know growing up in the country why did I I was commissioned by uh Gina to do this show the director of Gina Maybe and she said uh oh you know you can come with this anywhere you like and I was like oh actually I'd love to talk about that region and the lead up to that show of course uh something else circumstances were again to overtake that changed the show led to of course early 2020 with the uh bushfires uh so not only everybody closed the show earlier bushfires had already threatened uh my family's place uh much earlier and I had um been fascinated with the history of Wambian and Wombian caves obviously there was the marble clawing that closed in 2000 so when growing up there I I carved a little marble when I was a kid got my first hammer and chisel when I was eight eight years old from my dad because I was blunting his wood gizzard on on this stone. My familiarity with the medium goes way back. It's um something that it's not as easy a line just because I grew up around it. But you don't rule it out at art school having done audio and performance art and at art school to then come to a medium and the the idea of the theatricality of the object being as a proxy for my voice and the things that I would like to discuss to um you know look at marble and not rule it out. You know, simply out of familiarity. One, it was uh you know if you think to the late 90s postmodernism had said you know out with the hierarchy of materials. And therefore I meant that marble was on the bottom they invert you know but it if there were if you're a true postmodernist, anything goes in the w was kind of well I'm putting it simply but uh the idea that uh you could toy with this loaded history in in different ways is what made me pick up the hammer and chisel again as an adult uh to to play with a material that was more quote unquote concrete and reveal it to be not um and uh when looking at the material in this show The Great Escape well I was looking at the history of the quarry and how they used to um uh sh uh quarry shale kerosene and they used to have a lot of um byproduct of that and they used to float it down the river and set it a light and the image ever since I heard that story that byproduct is we know commonly as petrol but back in the day back in uh 1905 thereabouts uh they were just burning it off on the on the tops of the creek of obviously environmentally devastating terrible um but uh I worked with a pyrotechnics friend and we created a video that had flame across the top of uh a small section of uh Rock Creek and we did that in a safe way and uh we decided that that was entirely inappropriate to show during those devastating times dry times and during the bushfires so I I came up with this uh work um this work uh taking its lead from the alchemic cycle bakes the marble dust uh down and uh into little tiled slabs now if you that actually is just quick lime and what what's happened is in the in the baking the um is is become uh calcium hydroxide it's hydroscopic it wants to pull water out of the air and it also wants to reclaim uh the carbon that it had lost in the burning so it actually reclaims carbon and actually swells to about three times its size uh and so over the course of this exhibition the moisture the carbon breathed out by the humans in the air and all that sort of thing is is uh reclaimed by the material and it slowly swells so it's called the track the work is called the track and there's the idea that the science of materials offers a possibility to at least give us an avenue by how we may come to a different conclusion in the future about the environment. The science is our answer. Science is about learning more so that we can be better and do better. I think it was it was one of actually uh it might not be immediately evident but it's actually one of my more hopeful works. Or it becomes because these things, these tiles will swell and become one uh by the end of the exhibition there I'm not sure if they have a photograph of it there, but it's all connected up by the end into one single way one single pathway, let's put it that way.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:03

But the whole device is a carbon capture mechanism in one way. It's that's right. Capturing carbon that's correct. That's I'll of course we didn't get to see that exhibition but um we've got during lockdown.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:16

But um yeah lockdown kicked in the in the second month of presentation.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:21

But it seems that and mostly we're talking about postmodernism and material materiality and um you you mentioned having made a video in I mean just this year you've really seemed to have expanded the the material the materials in which you're working.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:38

I know that you presented the history of forgetting at Tweed Regional Gallery where you incorporated photography video alongside new marble carvings and also an original musical work um which was extreme it was seemed to be an extremely conceptually ambitious exhibition in the sense that it's it it it's grappling with the unreliability of both person of both the personal and the collective or in other words memory which I suppose you're talking about um the whole time in your work can you can you give us take us through um each of the elements of this work and then as an explanation yeah happy check um the so for instance that's a great one to start on that image there um so this uh this particular piece is called History is is buried in my backyard and why it's a great one to start with is that um I'm one of four boys growing up in the countryside uh off grid spent a lot of time playing in the bush we're digging down near the billibong one time and uh I can't even remember why maybe to build some play forts to sling mud at each other or something and uh we find an old uh bottle and then you know I could see that I I remember pulling it out of the ground with my brothers and it had a wax seal on it and a note inside the note and we argued we took it to the parents they said don't open it it'll it'll just dissolve the note and they were right we opened it and it just the note dissolved before our very eyes in the in the the fresh air uh it had been so dry inside the bottle and uh we've always disagreed about how the even that story went out so if my personal choice I kind of would agree on with my brothers who were there at the time imagine dear coping with the the um the enormous uh task of of Australian history and and yes and I I had the that bottle dated and it was uh by the his there's actually a historical uh glass uh society here in Sydney and they said about 1951 it's um by the OT company who commissioned their cordial bottle that's actually a cordial bottle um uh uh companies like Cotties used to have their own little region uh cotties is one we know today because it grew into a much bigger company but OT was a uh a large enough company for the um that region down there in in Southern Table of lands and uh we even found the original recipe for the bottle that was the the cordial inside which is actually a lemon lemon and chili uh uh cordial which we served at the opening of the uh exhibition um but these panels are recovered from of uh our Wambian marble so from that from that region um they were uh for 50 years they were on the front of the Commonwealth Bank in George Street until they were removed about 30 years ago um to be um uh then stored in a marble yard in Gladesville until I found them and uh purchased them. They sort of reclaimed their own story and uh we um scanned the the the texture on the on the bottle that I had found we still have that bottle and um and had a robot carve this uh the bottle texture and pattern um with all of its imperfections uh onto those panels in high in well not high relief low relief it looks high relief there but um those staggered lines um were done quite coarsely in two millimeter steps um which is actually quite coarse for the resolution of an object but for me it it had resonances to where what for me is a very 80s memory in the 1980s all the computer screens were eight bit and all those traveling lines and it glistens and and and is fuzzy even to the point of uh distortion when you walk up close and you can see those lines cut into it. Uh it's just placing it in a very specific time and place and and context. Yeah. And that's the nature of uh Pretty much this body of work is to look at uh what it what was it to be growing up in Bombian Caves, um not knowing too much about the landscape or the traditional owners, um, no matter the best efforts to ask why and how, some of the objects of youth and uh so for instance, the um the bunny rabbit of my um uh that was given to me by my grandmother. It's actually only a tiny thing, no more than uh 15 centimeters long. I've made them overscaled in a classic um Alice in Wonderland distortion. Absolutely. And same, same with my own hands and feet on the um the ladder to the loft. My father was a uh romantic uh mathematician, is a romantic mathematician, I should say, but he uh built the the hut, the family home called to the golden ratio, and including handmaking in wood uh to the golden ratio, the uh the ladder that went up to the loft where the four my three brothers and I slept side by side.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:06

Um, eccentricity of your family.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:10

Ah, yes, well that's that's a whole other show at some stage. But the um the nature of um the landscape there and memory, you know, even in the last 20 years since the rise of digital devices, and ever since I had one in my hand in the l in the probably late 90s, I've been feeling filming down in Greenhood. Um the family property is called Greenhood, actually, because of the nate the local native uh orchid that grows there called the Greenhood. And uh the devices on the screen down there, um, when you're talking about opening up of mediums, you know, I first looked at taking footage from across all of my digital devices across the last 20 years uh or so, and a little bit more actually, and presenting them all at the same time in the one space. So it's um you know the best way of presenting that was actually on devices that are dated to that era or a little bit, just a little bit older, but it could keep up with the fuzziness of some of the original late 90s footage. Um, because when you show them on modern devices, it looked awful. But but it also places them in in a in very particular moments in time and extracts them from it as well because they're running in real time and playing with the volume up uh in a in a in a in an actual volume. Well now I will say I will say though that um photography, I I I've always loved photography. All of my exhibitions have had photography in them. Um just people remember the marble more. I think that's what I was trying to deal with in 2013. Is it nobody nobody remembers the video in photography? Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:51

Angelo certainly thinks so.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:52

And that and that's why, I mean, around the corner there, there was also the presentation of uh Left Turner Albuquerque, which is uh uh uh which also featured in The Great Escape, uh, which is a work I did in 2016, where if you recall, it's a Left Hand Albuquerque, the title is um is lifted from a bug's bunny uh phrase that he would say, Oh, I knew I should have taken a left-toner Albuquerque, which turns which which meant that he was actually popping out in um New Mexico. Um and in Mexico and he would be going under Trump's wall. And uh Trump has just had just been elected, and uh I decided to make a wall of stone that I would actually carve through in a in a sort of tunneling kind of um uh act. And it it took many nights to do it and succeed in doing it, and the actual um object was presented also at uh the great escape, but pushing through that tunnel, uh trying to dig through that tunnel. I had many discussions while on um uh on residency at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop in 2000 and uh that was sort of apologies, I'm time frame, it all blurs. In 2018, some years later, uh after I'd done that work, I I was discussing with um uh a granddaughter of one of the original Great Escape escapees. Oh, really? Uh the nature of escape. She did a lot of tunneling artwork as well. There was a fellow artist in residence there. It was it was a really interesting time. But the idea of the the Great Escape, you know, you're always itching to get out of the country and of course only to return. Yeah. The uh you you run away from the your use and your beginnings and come back to them later on.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:53

Like that serious prisoner.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:55

Yeah, classic, classic move.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:58

No, you but you play more, you even push this idea of um memory and its fallibility and adding sort of even more the notions of the the possible humor in your exhibition permanent good stream, some rocks, which um also with a number of different media and a very healthy dose of humor. What was your possibility here?

SPEAKER_00 1:11:23

Oh well, the um it was it was diving even further into um this idea of uh change and uh the distance the more you evolve. Maybe, maybe this is my best uh what you could say COVID post-COVID show, COVID lockdown show, kind of in the introversion of thinking about uh the early beginnings and where how far you've come. Uh, you employ the the um ship of theseus and uh well, particularly those works that are hanging behind you, the um Spot the Difference, the bookshed, uh that was built by my father um and filled with books, and he said, Boys, this is our education. Um, we were also going to the local school and things, but I ravenously read every single book in there. And um, of course, that was uh that seemed to me like my world, but was of course only uh a small selection of uh my parents' tastes, uh ranging from my my mother's books on the the art of uh the Egyptians, uh ancient Egyptians, um you know, the fruit the sculpture and buildings of the pharaohs, and uh stories of my dad's books on um philosophy, um the encyclopedia Britannica are read in Inside and Out. And uh they had a shared love of science fiction, which of course asked the question of where are we going, what is next. I think the science fiction collection in there in there from Philip K. Dick, um to um to uh to reading Isaac Asimov when I'm when I'm eight years old. I read I read June when I when I was about nine, the entire series, uh with this idea of time and our hands out there in the bush. To be and uh those those things still inform the the kind of the questions that good science fiction pose, uh absolutely where, if you ever ask where psychological come from, it is absolutely there. The idea of asking what is next if we go down this route, if you take this as a presumption or as a given, where do we where what happens next?

SPEAKER_02 1:13:32

Oh, I agree. And are we allowed to um I think we may as well move on because this is the perfect time to, with those looking at those two uh photographs, it's a perfect time to focus now on the installation we have here. It's our love for art installation. There's no place like home where I think you you could hear, I think you've ingenious and employed a number of elements in your work that run through or consistently run through your work to wrap up all these scenes and concepts and and the materials that have been hang out through your hack, basically making games to create what you've created here is a world within a world in a multi-layered, multimaterial manner that combines well, it combines your classic conceptual rigor, you know, your material virtuosity and your your humor, um all together to make a specific statement about yourself but and the world at the same time. Um so I perhaps starting with those two. I don't know, where would you like to start in in this exhibition?

SPEAKER_00 1:14:45

Well, start starting with the um the sawdust short drop throne, um that's a replica of the of a plywood toilet that's still in existence. Oh, that's in an outdoor shed overlook uh down in Greenford overlooking uh a waterfall. And uh the and the and the guinea core creek down below. And you can hear it when sitting on on the on that toilet. And you get a little bit of that experience there. Uh your nanospace here has enabled me a a chance to kind of recreate a little bit in a um what I would call a poor similar, a very poor copy of a place that actually exists. And I've used um the not only the local Wombian, but um the Wombian marble with you know has this beautiful history of um uh having built a lot of uh Sydney buildings in the last hundred years, or at least decorated a lot of the Sydney buildings in the last hundred years. And it was particularly done by uh two brothers, the Molocco brothers. And uh they they also found uh a quarry in Western Australia where they quoted this um uh green marble uh from a number of years, and they named it after themselves, the Moloch and Jade Green Marble. Uh but um their ingenuity um in using every bit of the material, they would waste nothing, um, meant they invented many little terrazzo recipes that would they were then to sell to bore all uh so many different concrete recipes. Like a they're a testament to ingenuity and um uh they loved artists as well. And they're a very particular kind of creature. And then the kind of idea of the positive uh contribution of uh migrants in Australia often doesn't get cold enough, you know. Um and on the so this so this toilet is actually in existence, but it's been plastic and plywood, and I've made an ornate uh version of it.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:53

Which we are using here. This we're we are this is our action.

unknown 1:17:00

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:00

So the original ones actually uh short of uh sawdust uh uh ones whereas sawdust is um you know um uh actually really hygienic uh way of uh covering up. And then the um then the the that's used as fertilizer later on. And uh obviously that can't be done here because you've got an actual toilet, but I could at least invite you to sit on the on the same proportions of the of the of of that actual uh of that actual little dunny drop box. And um and we have opposite that is the digital uh wall of devices that has footage of many different years of the waterfall down at Guinecall Creek opposite it. So you have the sound of the mass sound of many of us 14 devices there cascading away as if it was the um that waterfall was in flood. And one of the tragic things about uh you know the parents saying, Oh, we'd love to find a place for the waterfall is that the truth is for the majority of my life that that waterfall has not been flowing at all. It's uh it's just a testament, of course, to environmental conditions of the last uh 40 years that uh the good majority of uh the time the place has been in drought. That there just hasn't been enough water. And yeah, absolutely. That's a larger format version of the same thing. And there's been deep drought, and every time it has flooded, I've gone down and filmed it um a few times it has, and that's uh multiple different years at the same time uh worth of footage. And when you um then look to your left from the the toilet, not only would you see actual virtual stones, these river stones that come from the um permanent good stream some rocks show, where it's quite obviously human-made, not natural river stones. Um more Pokemon Go than anything natural, but um a combination of all these different Australian uh marbles. Um the idea of a simulation that we really do have a distorted view of nature uh because not only because of our impact, but because of our belief in being able to control nature, a misguided belief, in my opinion. And uh that's that's those words. And then above it is um premiering this new piece, uh, which is the replacement of your countertop, bathroom countertop there, with uh a sheet of uh Maloken Jade green marble.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:42

With um it definitely is a countertop. It's certainly counter.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:48

So I've carved into the top, reduced the whole amount by about five millimeters in thickness, and left behind uh carvings of uh of these water droplets. Uh great because the uh material uh allows it, as in all of those swirls and dramatic character lines of the the black and the and the white uh marble in interleaved into that green. Uh you know, optically distort when raised and rounded off like that under the droplets. So it actually kind of exaggerates the effect of an actual water droplet that would optically distort the uh the pattern of whatever's beneath it. Yeah, so that's it in the studio being made. And um, of course, these uh this is running at the very simple device of uh uh marble as a as so embedded with the language of traditional monument. The idea that these are teeny teeny little monuments to every drop of precious water that um we ever had to be accounted for when growing up. Uh, not only down at Wambian uh and uh special watering cans and all that sort of thing. Um and make you know, measuring the tank during periods in the high summer very carefully to make sure that we weren't using too much. Water really was a precious commodity. And I think that was the truth for a good a good proportion of rural Australia in the last uh 30 years.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:16

Absolutely Alex.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:19

Um Ryan thank you so much. Um, as ever, it was such an insight to speak with you, especially about you and your work, which uh and the world, which are all so completely in entwined. Um sitting here, I don't know if you can hear the waterfall to my right. I mean, it really is um incredible. I I'm busting to go to the little busting to must sit on the train now after being here for an hour with the waterfall. But um thank you very much, Alex, and we and look forward to seeing you soon.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:57

Yeah, thank you very much, and thanks for the opportunity to to make a little world in that space. It's actually perfect the the the degree of intimacy you have in there. I really love that.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:08

Okay, thank you. Bye.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:10

Lovely talking with you. Thanks, Amanda. Bye.