1995 Jodies Bedside Reading
1996 House/Home | Found Paints Lane
1997 I wanted to do something to get myself a name
1998 Table of Contents and About the Author
1999 I am Missing
2003 The Dead Girl

 

 

 

 

Found Paints Lane

type-c photograph
100 x 70 cm
1996

This is one of the earliest found images I used in my work. The title states where I found the image - in Paints Lane Chippendale, Sydney where I was living at the time and in the habit of walking my dog looking for stuff. It was lying in the gutter the white edges of the slide caught my attention as I walked past and had to decide to walk back to see what it was - I was not dissapointed.

 

 

 

Jodies Bedside Reading

Collection of true crime books and crime memorabilia belonging to Jodie with transcribed interview about her collection. Part of exhibition "I really want to kill you but I don't remember why?" with Jasmine Hirst and Linda Dement @ Artspace Sydney 1995

 

 

 

 

House/Home

100 square meters of 'Trophy' grey carpet removed from a youth refuge, dimensions variable 1996

300 square feet of trophy gray synthetic carpet flooring retrieved from a housing project for homeless youth, where I worked for four years as a youth worker.

I liked the idea of laying a specific structure physically, philosophically and emotionally, one over another, in this case a housing refuge for homeless youth and a public art gallery, operated with almost identical management structures put in place to satisfy government funding guidelines.

The physicality of the work is humbled by its invisibility, emphasized by using a long hallway as an entrance carpet into the space exploiting the references to accessibility and accountability and to whom?

My initial desire to show this carpet piece was as a whole floorplan intersecting all gallery walls, was not possible for artists exhibiting as finalists for The Helen Lempriere Traveling Art Scholarship, a yearly round up of emerging artists vying for this publicized prize. The majority of the remaining carpet from this six bedroom house could not be accommodated in this group exhibition, and was therefore rolled up and left leaning against the entrance wall.

In this instance of House/Home (image on right) the carpet pieces were displayed room by room for inspection. Situated behind glass in a purpose built display window of the Mark Foys building; once a department store and now a District Criminal Court House the history of the building itself suggests a colonization of government bodies, onto a failing free market. Creating a direct relationship between prison and the courts and jobs for homeless young people.

Again one structure has imposed itself on another, and the carpet simultaneously displays and exposes the public tax dollar, quantified via the quality and longevity of the carpet as being equal to the publics empathy for the character of the homeless youth and their plight.

 

 

I wanted to do something to get myself a name

Collection ofThe Criminologist journals
two gum bicrhromate prints Expert Witness & Unreliable Witness
1997

This work investigates the truths around crime. The title is borrowed from a statement made by a murderer when asked why he had killed a group of annonymous people shopping in a mall. I was reading a lot of Colin Wilson at the time and this quote was from one of his books "The Criminal History of Mankind". I found the Criminologist journals at Portobello markets while I was living in London and found amusing the titles of the articles, which combined and conflated various social behaviors within a crime discourse. The Expert Witness and Unreliable Witness images bought together the major player in these scenarios : the 30 something white male.

 

 

 

 

Table of Contents + About the Author

300kg of paper, pallet, A4 packet of paper
1998

Boths works are texts from a book about a series of murders - Garden of Evil - The Granny Killers Reign of Terror. Well the book was really about the murderer - John Wayne Glover - he murdered elderly women in thier homes, usually located in a weathly sydney suburb of Mossman.

This work is about the books that get written about murder and the conventions that surround these case histories, and thier publication. The author of this book - Larry Writer - has also written many books about murder - and sport - perhaps not such unrelated topics after all? The contents of the book read like a great tragedy - and of course it was. The way the motivations, situations and outcomes end up being summed up is sometimes comical.

 

 

 

I am missing

black and white photograph
100 x 70 cm
1999

Two images among many from a childhood library book; Unsolved Crimes of Violence in Australia have created an afterimage still with me today. I had tried on a few occassions to relocate the book to finally discover in my artschool library. Published by the NSW Police Department it chronicles a dozen unsolved murders of children, some still missing 40 years later.

Its funny how connections between works happen I am currently living in Canberra and the image of Geoffrey Rowland refers to a murder that took place here in 1971 of Keren Rowland who's Mini Minor ran out of petrol on her way home on evening and that was the last anyone saw of her, until her body was found in bush nearby Canberra airport 3 months later, the case remains unsolved.

The images were accompanied by two video works the first was a text version of Hoddle Street Massacre showing transcribed diagloge from recordings asking people on the streets of Melbourne if they remembered teh Hoddle Street Massacre and what they were doing on that day, as well as direction on how to get to the site. The second video recorded myself reading various true crime books with a random soundtrack of talk back radio.

Crimes enter folklore and myth relatively young in thier history and are considered cold after a week. "These images mesh personal fracture and painful memory to its very re-staging via the media..." (Blair French, Catalogue essay, Art+Politics, Australian Perspecta 1999

 

 

The Dead Girl

DVD 11 mins
Soundtrack : Pointt Blannk & Intensity
2003

 

A still camera documents the stop animation of a rope sculpture that spells
THE DEAD GIRL in text on the wall. Each rope extends from the wall onto a padded platform shaping the same letter at the end of each rope. These extended letters roam the stage in choreographed movements pausing to create a sequence of anagrams of THE DEAD GIRL.

THE DEAD GIRL is a quick perusal of true crime, mystery and thriller writing. All the clues lead from an to THE DEAD GIRL. The work constantly re-quotes itself, presenting fictionalized stories of murder as interchangeable with actual instances of social violence.

THE DEAD GIRL IN LIGHTS draws out the text of THE DEAD GIRL in christmas lights which blink on and off in an elaborate equence in total blackness. Like stars before your expiring eyes, the lights beacon and hypnotize.