2006

I've have spent the greater part of my 30 year working life in the building and construction industry as a project manager and in this series I return to examine a brief passage of time during and just after the demolition of one particular building. This is represented by the altered state of the building’s core materials. All construction is built after the destruction and removal of whatever previously inhabited the site, whether that was an older building or natural bush land. What is generated from this demolition is generally referred to as garbage, rubbish, trash and/or landfill.  I would like to examine some found objects [and the machine that destroyed/created them] from one such site, that of the former Junction Hardware Building at Ipswich Road, South Brisbane. 

Interestingly these transformed objects [with their original function no longer obvious] tend to take on a negative value and consequently since they are of no further use, they are regarded as unsanitary, unsightly, dangerous, dirty and unclean. The socially constructed value of the object [given to it by our society] has changed with the passing of its finite life as part of the building. The materials’ life of usefulness and meaning has changed with the demolition of the building to that of a valueless state viewed mainly as socially sanctioned rubbish. They now form part of the 20th-century phenomenon known as planned obsolescence.

On another level I see in these objects an enormous semiotic richness which stems from their subversive nature, for each transformed object displays a reference to two or more distinct times and technologies, where the once normally dominant state or form has been subverted by its transformation.

In this series I try to reflect the dirty and unsanitary perception of these objects by the use of the duotone process while also endeavoring to expose their rich mnemonic history without the distraction of colour. As we are all trained to read the visual image, I ask you the viewer, to consider these hybrid images as displaying both a beauty and a history of not only the object and the times we live in, but also of myself and my history now reflected only in my art.