Year_ 2011

Description_ mixed media installation incorporating glass vials, tubes, artificial vine, sculpture & video projection

Location_ China Arts Projects, Osage Gallery, Beijing, China

Year_ 2012

Exhibited_ Art Gallery of NSW

In After Eden, Janet continues her exploration of the destruction of the environment with particular emphasis on the plight of animals, whilst simultaneously attempting to address notions of healing and caring.

Commissioned by Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, 2012

date_ 2011

materials_ Mesh, laboratory glass, acrylic, mirror, several plant species, seeds, water, medicinal tubing, salts, minerals, various fluids, organza wrapped botanic specimens, rice flour, plywood floor

location_ Hong Kong Art Fair Artist Project Courtesy of Cat Street Gallery.

description_ The Resuscitation Garden is a Medicinal Garden that  plays between the clinical and the romantic. It creates a space of interconnection and care suggesting a hospital or intensive care unit for plants. A transparent mesh structure echoing a botanical glasshouse and a museological scientific vitrine, filled with both medicinal plants for their healing as well as  ailing and dead plants (representing our threatened planet). All are inter connected to medicinal equipment and laboratory scientific vessels, various fluids and solids, creating a space of revival and resuscitation.The work amplifies and imagines the invisible processes and psychological state of plants as indicators of the well being of our planet. We are confronted with their being and plight in which we are so interconnected and dependent.

The work clearly addresses environmental sustainability, fragility and the need for awareness and healing. Collapsing science into a poetical and play that poses the possibility of art as a healing medium. At the same time within this crowded context a tiny sanctuary invites entry wonder and participation.

Hong Kong Art Fair Artist Project Courtesy Cat Street Gallery. This work is consistent with previous botanical  installations including: ELIXIR in Nigata Japan permanent project for Echigo Tsumari Triennale; 2003 CELLULAR GARDENS collection MCA Sydney; 2007 WAITING – A medicinal Garden for Ailing Plants for 17th Biennale of Sydney; and 2010 MEMORY OF NATURE Breenspace Sydney.

title_ Tarkine (For a World in Need of Wilderness)

date_ 2011

materials_ Duraclear, acrylic, mirror, stainless steel wire

location_ Macquarie Bank Foyer, London.

description_ In the central area of the new large foyer of Macquarie Bank is a floating  verdant  wilderness, this new artwork is in stark contrast to the built up urban context of the city of London. Made up from a series of images drawn from the precious and threatened wilderness of the Tarkine region  in Tasmania, Australia. Transparent and layered images hang from the ceiling with mirror panels creating a semi spiral sculptural formation. It is an experiential piece that transforms in changing light as one moves along and around it (there being no fixed viewing point). The work expresses the beauty and wonder of nature, amplified through reflection and transparency. Visible from both inside and outside through windows along Ropemaker street the work is able to have a public presence and illuminated at night the work forms a vast lantern experience. The images shift between fluid abstracted painterliness and amplified botanical details and passages of the verdant landscape. The work conforms to the Macquarie Banks collection expressing the Spirit of Australian Landscape.

The artwork makes visible an almost secret place. The Tarkine is an Antipodean Eden at the other end of the world from London, however their histories are so totally entwined. Identified by WWF as one of the most threatened natural environments, still ecologically in tact, it is the second most important temperate rainforest in the world under threat from mining and forestry interests. It is imperative that such  a rare and special place is protected and preserved for our world in need of wilderness.

date_ 2010

exhibited_ Breenspace

date_ 2010

exhibited_ Breenspace

description_ Over twenty-five years Janet Laurence has ranged across painting, sculpture, photography, and installation, working with pigments and ash, taxidermied birds and trees, scientific instruments and all manner of glass. Her work incorporating botanical elements has served a variety of purposes. The salvaged timbers in “Edge of the Trees”, for instance, co-produced with Fiona Foley for the Museum of Sydney, were explicitly memorial; the Casuarinas and she-oaks planted for “In the shadow,” commissioned by Sydney’s Olympic Park in Homebush Bay, were reparative. Most recently for the 17th Biennale of Sydney, Laurence’s combination of living, ailing and dead plants in “Waiting: a medicinal garden for plants,” installed at the Royal Botanical Gardens, sounded a warning note about environmental fragility.
Laurence is known as an environmental artist and just as important as the ecological concerns inspiring particular projects is her interest in creating what she has called “spaces of perception that can bring us into contact with the life-world.” These “slowed spaces” generally take the form of installations, “immersive” environments where different processes of flux, fusion and transformation are given form. Here Laurence often makes extensive use of glass, playing on the connotations of the glasshouse and through the use of scientific instruments, botanical science. “Waiting” also exploited the glazed vitrine’s associations with natural history’s and museology’s intertwining of life and death. (Historically both have relied on dead specimens to explain the living.) Laurence’s Biennale work also invoked the Wardian case, the timber-framed glass box that enclosed an ideal growing environment and which revolutionized plant exploration in the second half of the nineteenth century while enabling city dwellers to grow plants indoors.
“Waiting” was designed to function like a plant hospital, a triage tent in a botanical garden where viewers are already in contact with the life-world. Put this way we could say that “Waiting” aimed to refine the kind of attention a viewer might already bring to bear on the botanical garden, focusing it specifically on the mutual and intertwined fragility of plants and humans in a threatened environmental collapse. Laurence’s project in BREENSPACE is very different. Although she uses many of the same elements, and in some cases, the same specimens, we are not in a glasshouse-like structure in a garden but in that quintessentially late twentieth century space for art—the white cube, sealed off from the vicissitudes of time, weather, and the possibility of change. Here Laurence’s acrylic boxed microgreens want to pose the question: what makes a garden?
Definitions will take us only so far. Mara Miller, in “The Garden as an Art,” suggests a garden is “any purposeful arrangement of natural objects … with exposure to the sky or open air, in which the form is not fully accounted for by purely practical considerations such as convenience,” and David E. Cooper proposes  “Gardens are places whose ingredients, typically and significantly, are living, growing, or other natural thing … they are human artefacts imbued with purpose.”(i) Yet the nineteenth century collections of ferns grown in Wardian cases and closed to the atmosphere were gardens, and the Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto houses a famous garden which comprises no living material apart from the moss surrounding the fifteen boulders installed on a sea of raked gravel.  Laurence’s question is less about the minimal conditions necessary for a definition than it is an attempt to approach the garden as something that exists in addition to the presence of plants or soil or atmosphere. This means thinking of the containers of plant matter on view here—the test tube with its fledgling eucalyptus, the cubes of proto-salad—as sites demanding a particular response, one which might be summed up as follows: gardens require a constancy of care.(ii)
Gardening’s engagement with care was a feature of  “Waiting” where the conceit of the plant hospital reversed the medicinal garden’s onus of care. Instead of the garden holding healing plants—the plants that care for us–it held plants waiting to be healed. This reversal chimes perfectly with the current mode of environmental crisis but in BREENSPACE Laurence looks beyond the question posed by “Waiting”– can we keep the plants that keep us? – to consider the making of gardens as an activity defined by human needs other than simple survival. What makes a garden then is not simply the compendium of natural and other elements found within it but something in the relationship of the gardener to the plants tended, a thing Cooper calls “a shared good.” (iii)
By putting the garden into the precincts of art, Laurence encounters significant but surmountable practical problems. (“Waiting,” which was housed in a purpose-built structure in the midst of a public garden, demanded the daily ministrations of an attendant.) Water, mud, slime: the gallery space can in any case accommodate all these and, as Brian O’Doherty noted in his now classic 1976 analysis of the white cube’s ideology, it will turn them into art. (iv) What is harder to accommodate is the garden’s dependence on human care for this is a relationship unfolding in time, and time and change are, according to O’Doherty, sealed off from the gallery’s space. Laurence uses the white cube to throw the issue of care into sharper relief, forcing, by way of contrast, one of those “spaces of perception” that bring viewers into contact with the life-world.
The life-world she conjures up in BREENSPACE is not all green. Laurence combines stuffed owls, miniature lights and possibly fake greenery with living plants to suggest the idea of a garden, knowing that garden history countenances artifice of various kinds—fake ruins, concrete faux bois, and topiary, as well as the symbolic and representational use of plants. The small room within BREENSPACE strikes a different note for among the acrylic boxes, dried specimens and laboratory glassware there are no living plants. Laurence speaks of this as a memorial to lost gardens, indeed to a lost nature.
As a human product, the garden is never exclusively “natural” but it may be all we have, and not only because true wilderness is disappearing but because the garden says something about our place in nature. Robert Pogue Harrison, looking at gardens made by homeless people in New York, puts it like this. “The fact that human beings create such things as gardens is strange, for it means that there are aspects of our humanity which nature does not naturally accommodate, which we must make room for in nature’s midst … gardens mark our separation from nature even as they draw us closer to it.” (v)

Ingrid Periz

i. Mara Miller, “The Garden as an Art” (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993, p. 14; David E. Cooper, “A Philosophy of Gardens,” OUP 2006, pp. 28, 39.
ii. Robert Pogue Harrison, “Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition,” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. p. 7. Harrison writes, “the true gardener is always the constant gardener.”
iii. Cooper, p. 74.
iv. Brian O’Doherty, “Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space” (Santa Monica: The Lapis Press, 1986) was first published in three installments in Artforum in 1976.
v. Harrison, p. 41

date_ 2010

exhibition_ Sydney Biennale 2010

description_ The work is a transparent mesh structure echoing both a botanical glasshouse and a museological scientific vitrine filled with plants (representing larger threatened environments) interconnected by scientific glass vessels. The medicinal cabinet/garden encloses various fluids and solids, creating a space of revival and resuscitation.

The work talks about environmental sustainability, fragility and loss of species. Based on scientific facts, the space amplifies and imagines invisible processes and psychological state of plants. We are confronted with their being and plight in which we are implicated.

date_ 2008

materials_ duraclear, stainless steel, oil on acrylic

collection_ Department of Forestry, Canberra, ACT

year_ 2008

materials_ Duraclear, mirror, oil and Acrylic

exhibited_ Hugo Michelle Gallery Adelaide, Breenspace Sydney

Year_ 2005

Collection_ Art Gallery of NSW

Size_1100mm x 1100mm x 400mm

Year_ 2002

Exhibitied_ University of South Australia Art Museum, Adelaide, Australia for the Adelaide Festival

Year_ 2007

Size_ 1m x 6m

Materials_ Duraclear, Oil on Acrylic

Exhibitied_ Arc 1, Melbourne, Australia

Year_ 2007

Size_ 1m x 1m

Materials_ Duraclear, Oil on Acrylic

Year_ 2007

Location_ Arc 1 Gallery, Melbourne

Year_ 2008

Location_ Arc 1 Gallery, Melbourne

Materials_ Glass vials, botanical specimens, wood, steel, polished aluminium mirror

Size_ Variable

Year_ 2008

Materials_ glass, carbonised botanical specimens, 30 x 25cm, glass blown by Gabriella Bisetto

date_ 2002

location_ commission for Qantas Lounge, Sydney International Airport, Australia

On the wall behind are 2 convex mirrors also veiled in black tulle. The mirrors reflect the total double image and the viewer.

The images are close up bodies of various mammals showing their breathing.

The sound of the breathing shifts and changes but creates a slow rhythm that connects to our own breath.

The work continues my interest in bringing into art the fragility and threat by man to our natural environment and those that inhabit it.

Year_ 2003

Location_ Private Collection

Year_ 2007

Exhibited_ Bildkultur Galerie, Stuttgart, Germany

date_ 2004

materials_ Duraclear, acrylic, aluminium, oil, pigments

date_ 2004

materials_ Duraclear, acrylic, aluminium, oil, pigments

exhibited_ Kröller-Müller Museum, De Hoge Veluwe National Park, The Netherlands

photo_ Andrus Lipsys

date_ 2003

materials_ Duraclear, acrylic, glass

date_ 1993

materials_ four pillars, glass, wood, nickel, silver marble, each 11 m x 0.6 m

location_ Hall of Memory, Australian War Memorial, Canberra

collaboration_ Tonkin Zulaikha Harford Architects

date_ 2001

materials_ hanging voile, glass, sulphur, laboratory glass

location_ Uniting Church, Paddington, Sydney, Australia

curated_ by Rod Pattenden

photos_ Peter Solness

text_ Ah, not to be cut off
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars
The inner – what is it?
if not intensified sky
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming
- Rainer Maria Rilke

The Church, a space to experience the ineffable. The Church is also the manifestation of an idea – a pathway for transformation where faith, as a veil, can shift our perception of the world.

Hanging translucent material in space, this work explores the fluid and experiential passage where the body, space and time enfold into one another. It is part of an ongoing project that creates fugitive and transitory spaces as an exploration of an ephemeral architecture.

This church provides a special dimension to this work.

Within the confines of the building the work is designed to act as a literal and metaphoric veiling. We look at and through layered veils… drifting and still, open and closed, in-between spaces, hiding and revealing, inside and outside.

The work enables the re-experiencing of the building, where the materiality of stone walls is juxtaposed against the weightlessness of the veils.

Within this space a relationship between matter and immateriality is formed. The warm stone-walled structure encloses and protects; transformations of thought and perception are made imaginable. The spiritual question returns to us as a transparent possibility.

The work grasps at making visible states of transformation and the shift between perception and memory.

It is the still space of the Church that enables our experience of our being in a space. This space, sensitive to motion and actions, which unfold within, makes it amenable to the present and presence. The Church creates this space for becoming.

Janet Laurence

date_ 1992-95

materials_ stainless steel, black steel, photograph, zinc, aluminium, wood, veneer, oil, wax, burnt wood

date_ 2005

materials_ Duraclear on shinkolite, oxides and ash in oil rusted steel

exhibited_ Art Gallery of New South Wales

photos_ Diana Panuccio

text_ The Garden is already a layered space – its aesthetic and natural qualities often veil its symbolic meanings or reveal them as reflective spaces. I consistently returned to the garden as an immersive and symbolic space for my concerns combining the exploration of memory and the memorial.

Spaces of reflection, that also engage perceptually and sensually; spaces that enable a passage, both metaphorically and within time. Spaces that are constructed and natural, that grow and die and bloom again creating a sense of dissolve and collapse. As a space of transformation in the way memory shifts and recreates itself and persists. Its past is always in the present.

This work THE in STANCE OF MEMORY takes the Garden of the Jewish Museum – the Hoffmanngarten – and juxtaposes materiality and illusion. Photographic images emerge and disperse and bleed away. In red glazed pours over stainless and rusted steel I’m attempting to explore the shift between the reflective perceptual space into a space of memory and a psychological reflection, a play between movement and stasis.

The architectural structures of the 49 columns of this seemingly solid space become fluid and transparent; the leaf laden pathways disappear into darkness; the whole space becomes fugitive.

Janet Laurence

date_ 1991

materials_ lead, ash, wood, photograph, straw, laboratory glass, Perspex, fluorescent lights and X-rays

size_ 600 x 700 cm

exhibited_ Wharf 2, Sydney, 1991

collection_ Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

date_ 1998

location_ windows for the Central Synagogue, Bondi, Sydney Australia

collaboration_ Jisuk Han

date_ 1977

materials_ sandstone blocks from various demolished Sydney buildings, with text of extinct species in iron oxide

size_ dimensions variable

exhibited_ Australian Perspecta 1997: Between Art and Nature, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney

date_ 1991

materials_ treated photographs, ash, wood, glass, each unit

collection_ Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

size_ 55 x 65 cm

date_ 1993

materials_ seven metals, oil, various substances and laboratory glass

size_ 3 x 5 m

exhibited_ Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia

date_ 1992-93

materials_ lead, glass, salt, sulphur, mercury, X-ray, various substances, lily, fluorescent lights, room size 5 x 5 m

room size_ 5 x 5 m

exhibited_ “The Boundary Rider: 9th Biennale of Sydney”, Bond Stores, Sydney Australia

photos_ Tim Marshall

date_ 1997

materials_ Aluminium, various pigments, oil glaze

date_ 1993

materials_ salt, fluorescent light, stainless steel, lead, aluminium, laboratory glass, wax, various minerals and X-rays

size_ room size 14 x 14 m

exhibited_ Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane

photos_ Richard Stringer

date_ 1996

materials_ glass, wood, aluminium, oxides, leaf mulch, seeds and oil

size_ 7 x 25 m

exhibited_ Newcastle University Art Gallery, New South Wales, Australia

photos_ Terrace Hollows

date_ 2000

materials_ fog, casuarina forest, bulrushes, resin, wands with stainless steel bases (height 2–9 m), text (numbers indicate water chemistry monitoring)

exhibited_ installed along a creek crossed by three bridges, Olympic Park, Homebush Bay, Sydney Australia

text_ In the shadow is an environmental art work which creates an atmospheric zone through which one passes over bridges.

The work is made of a series of vertical transparent wands echoing scientific measuring instruments standing at various heights within a creek . Twenty one “wands” symbolise and represent measurement of the various elements and water qualities monitored regularly.

At varying intervals, water blurps and aerates randomly – whilst sequenced along the 100 metres length of the work, atmospheric vaporous fog moves, rises and dissipates transforming and cooling the creek environment.

The edges of the creek are lined with bull rushes and the banks form a Casuarina forest on either side, framing the work while creating a soft organic green, ribbon-like space between the highly constructed environments of the tennis centre and main boulevard of the Sydney Olympic site.

The work aims to reveal the transforming chemistry of water remediation by creating a poetic alchemical zone as a metaphor for the actual transformation of Homebush Bay from its degraded contaminated industrial past into a green and living site for the future.

Janet Laurence

date_ 2005

materials_ wooden traditional house, glass panel screenprinted with poured paint and plant and fluids, blown-glass vials, plant extracts steeped in shochu, laboratory glass

exhibited_ permanent installation for Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial, Japan

photos_ Shigeo Anzai and Janet Laurence

sponsor_ Asahi Glass Corporation and Asahi Beer Co

text_ A botanical, glassy environment within a restored, traditional, small, wooden house.

One enters through a medicinal garden, into the wooden interior lined and layered with glass veils and vessels inscribed with plant names and stained with plant fluids, creating a laboratory like space echoing an old apothecary, or a tiny, botanical museum.

The viewer, immersed and reflected within this space is served the plant “elixirs”/juices, mixed with shochu as potions/drinks.

The research and plant processing has been a collaboration with the local community and preserves and offers an ancient tradition and knowledge of the medicinal plants and an intimacy with the natural environment of the region.

Janet Laurence

date_ 2005

materials_ duraclear, photographs, acrylic

exhibited_ Sherman Galleries – Sydney, Drill Hall – Canberra, Lawrence Wilson Gallery University of Western Australia – Perth, Arc One Gallery – Melbourne.

date_ 2006

materials_ Duraclear, shinkolite acrylic, aluminium, oil, pigment

size_ Various

date_ 2008

materials_ silican tubing, glass vials, pigmented fluids, tree branch

size_ 7m x 4m x 5m

exhibited_ Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Handle with Care, Art Gallery of South Australia

text_ Curator’s Statement_ Janet Laurence has had a long and profound engagement with the ‘life-world’. Spanning a period of over twenty-five years, her practice has extended to painting, sculpture, installation, photography, architectural and landscape interventions. The major themes that have emerged in the work include: the relationship between the museum, the natural world, and notions of preservation; the exploration of hybrid landscapes, that involve a fusion of natural and urban elements; alchemy and the transformation of elements from one state to another; and the human impact on the environment. Each of these projects is bestowed with a poetic resonance. Her work is not didactic or message driven. Rather, there is a lightness of touch, a respectful distance on the natural world, and a sense of wonderment. Laurence is deeply concerned with the changes in our midst. She asks us to look, hear, feel, smell and look again at the natural world – its architecture, its cultural history, its root system, the flux of light, space and colour. And as we engage in this process, our perception will shift, ever so delicately, as we discover further layers of
glaze, or discover the tiniest green leaf, or look in disbelief at signs of erosion and devastation. It seems that much of the desolation that has currently gripped the Australian landscape is beyond healing, and yet Janet Laurence explores what it might mean to heal, albeit metaphorically, the natural environment. For the Adelaide Biennial she suspends a large dead tree upside-down in the gallery space. Elongated transparent plastic tubes that have been treated with some kind of fluid from within protrude like rain from the edges of the branches. These tubes are at once a laboratory – a space for experimentation – and a prosthetic vascular system for a ‘body’ that has long since expired. As a scientific metaphor, they suggest hope for a solution.

As a ‘natural’ stand-in, these tubular stems act as a metaphorical conductor for the xylem and phloem (plant tissues that carry water, dissolved minerals and foodstuffs). Trees are of course the lungs of our cities – they exchange carbon dioxide and oxygen – and they usually live for several generations. Today, however, very old trees are dying in our cities, while the crops and fields in the outback have been transformed into vast barren expanses. Janet Laurence fuses this sense of communal loss with a search for connection with powerful life-forces. Her work alerts us to the subtle dependencies between water, life, culture and nature in our eco-system. In the face of this, we do yearn for a form of alchemy, for the power of enchantment or transformation. It seems that the only place for that sensation is the place of art. In the tradition of Joseph Beuys, and some of the Arte Povera artists from the 1960s, such as Jannis Kounellis or Mario Merz, Janet Laurence reminds us that art can act as a kind of transformation point for ideas and it can provoke its audience into a renewed awareness about our environment. Victoria Lynn.

date_ 2005

materials_ stainless steel, mild steel, acrylic, blown glass, rainforest plants, dimensions variable

collection_ MCA

date_ 2008

materials_ Duraclear, polished aluminium, acrylic

exhibited_ Arc One Gallery

date_ 2005

materials_ duraclear, photographs on acrylic

year_ 2004

materials_ Duraclear, acrylic, aluminium, oil, pigments

exhibited_ Sherman Galleries, Ian Potter Museum Melbourne, Lake Macquarie Gallery (The Museum Effect)

date_ 1997

materials_ Photographs on Duraclear, glass, oil, pigments, 450 x 1200 x 200 cm.

exhibited_ Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Australia and Nagoya, Japan

photos_ Jenni Carter

date_ 2000

materials_ Glass showcases displaying selected specimens and objects from the collections of Museum Victoria.

exhibited_ Melbourne Museum, Australia

photos_ John Gollings

artist’s statement_ “Stilled Lives” Showcases for Melbourne Museum

The collection of the Museum of Victoria is an overwhelming vast horizontal and vertical world of objects. Collected, classified, archived, arranged, ordered, labelled and re-labelled, they are preserved, conserved, analyzed, researched, valued and re-valued.

The galleria showcases create a fissure or seam, through which the collection has leaked and escaped from their adjacent storage. The objects are selected, not on museological principles but by attraction and empathy, through a reverence for each distinctive piece, whilst wanting to represent the larger mass of the collection.

I wanted to create a cosmos, a constellation, a panoramic work of great diversity, referencing the past while transforming it into a contemporary present. I am drawing connections across cultural and natural objects in order to convey a sense of these complex relationships, whilst enabling the viewer their own interpretations of each separate object.

These evocative objects “live” – dislocated and abstracted from their past histories, lives and functions in the world – yet are stilled in time.

They offer themselves for our investigation, our wonder and our continued understanding of the material world and our place in it. What we preserve for the future reflects what we value. It informs and sustains our perceptions of ourselves and the world in which we live.

Janet Laurence

date_ 2000

materials_ specimens from the collection of Melbourne Museum

exhibited_ The Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne, Australia

date_ 2006

materials_ Assembly of taxidermised bird specimens from the Australian Museum, suspended acrylic ring, sounds of birdcalls and wing flutters.

exhibited_ Object Gallery, Sydney, Australia

exhibition audio_ Ross Gibson in collaboration with Jane and Philip Ulman

photos_ Keith Saunders

text_ Thinking about titles to conjure sleep, dream, birdsong, waking…

To create an immersive, engaging enchanting work within the central space of the gallery utilising the truss circle as the basic design element under which the other elements of the installation grow/ spill out/ encircle within.

Borrowing and displaying a large array of ornithology specimens from the Australian Museum enables the exhibition to evoke a sense of wonder and sweet sadness. The ability to view the specimens intimately, at eye height, gives the possibility of drawing a viewer into their being, their loss and their presence.

Two overlapping arcs of polished reflecting acrylic – broken sections of rings – are suspended in the space by a series of vertical lines of cable, visually ghosting a birdcage. The birds lie side by side around the circular ‘beds’, sleeping and dreaming in death. They’re carefully placed, their feathered bodies encircled with tiny rings bearing words written by the artist, and their specimen tags attached bearing the words written by scientists who use the dead to understand the living.

The concept of enchanting, of singing into being – of presence and absence and a circle of viewing is enhanced through the multi-speaker sound installation exploiting the extraordinary mimicry of the Australian Lyrebird. Through the spatial layout of the speaker system and the activity of viewers in the space, the soundscape creates zones of silence and sound/ singing including an outside zone of calling/singing one in.

Year_ 2007

Location_ Arc 1 Gallery, Melbourne