Wednesday Canberra weather: regardless of any thing Neil Finn may have said, you don’t really have your own personal weather bubble. You can easily test this by travelling from the Woden Valley to the northside on foggy morning. Or getting on a plane in December and flying to Helsinki.
So those of you who are in Canberra today will probably experience much the same weather as each other. Warm to hot and slighty sticky. The weather equivalent of spilling cocoa on your new trousers.
Chemical interventions such as deodorant, sunscreen, mosquito repellent and anti-histamines are strongly indicated. Consider long before you commit to opaque tights, however hairy your legs are. Once the sun is over the yard arm, applications of gin and tonic may be beneficial.
Caren Florance (& Angela Gardner)
Working Papers (jostles)
Exhibiting space: Building 2, Lower level A Foyer
These are large-scale reproductions of small process moments of Working Papers, an artists' book collaboration with poet/printmaker Angela Gardner. We are exploring the sense and nonsense of composition, the immersive space of creativity. She works with her own poetry, casting and gleaning, and I work with hand-set letterpress, re-arranging her words to make new strange castings. The small moments of play, experimentation and process are caught, copied, and thrown up and out to allow quick or slow contemplation.
Laser-printed tyvek, 6 pieces, 841 x 1189mm ea.
Jen Webb (poems), Paul Hetherington (poems), Andrew Melrose (music)
‘he sat weeping on the shore’: remembering those who mourn (The Odyssey 5.82)
Exhibiting space: Room 2B2
In 2001, the Norwegian container vessel MV Tampa responded to a mayday call that led to the recovery of refugees, mostly Hazaras, seeking refuge in Australia. A period of international tension followed, with Captain Arne Rinnan insisting on landing the refugees on Australian soil, and the Australian government denying the request. This event is only one instance in a history of similar events; a history that is ongoing, with no let up in sight of the flows of desperate people. The objects in the installation seek to concretise the fragility of those seeking refuge; the poetry and other textual and sonic materials will attempt to re-imagine this event, and remember things that are forgotten in official representations of the global refugee crisis.
Mixed media: ship model, Preiser figures, eggshells, folded paper: 3D installation with sonic element, and handmade poetry collection for distribution
Lorraine Webb and Jen Webb
Letter and Line
Exhibiting space: Upper level, 2B7, space outside room.
These works are part of a larger collaboration between two sisters, one a painter and the other a poet. We are trying to find ways to work together within and across our forms: ways that are neither illustration nor ekphrasis. How does colour speak to word? What is the relationship between a line of poetry and a line of paint? Our first approach to this project is to break with some formal constraints: painting not on canvas but on odd-shaped objects; writing not lineated lyric poetry but prose poetry and fragments. Next is the openness that is a mark of most creative collaborations, a moving to and fro between images, ideas, conversations, essays into objects. We are concerned more with gestures than with the mark or the gaze, and with determining how, through the movement of eye and hand and conversation, we might make letter that speaks to line, line to letter.
Mixed media; painting on timber shapes, handmade or altered string/s, poems. 4 pieces, variable size and shape; 420mm wide x 1080 long; 1430mm wide x c.1340mm; 1725mm long x 240mm (diagonal); 40mm wide x 820mm long; with 2 – 4 poems, A5-sized.
