Narrow Focus

I took these four images in an alley way somewhere between Swanston and Russell St, not far off from where I took the image I used for my first project. This set of images was meant to convey a sense of entrapment and oppression. It's certainly an appropriate direction given that's exactly how I felt when taking these photographs, and something I'm exploring in my current printmaking practice.

Sunshine

The Senses

Sitting on a bench and enjoying a beautiful sunny Sunday morning at the gardens............

A Long Way From Home

No Skyscrapers, High Rises, Apartment Blocks and No pollution...

The luxury of being able to be camouflaged...

No potted plants in cement jungles....

Unreal...

site series 1

This is an instillation that was made at RMIT in the first year studio. The idea evolved from a found object that i stumbled across around the city campus. The object itself is a wooden support which would have been found between the legs of the chair for support. Through a series of experiments and material exploration, i decided to work with wax. It is an extremely malleable substance and with enough patients can achieve some stunning results.

I began by taking a mould of my object to replicate it as many times as needed. As simple as the object may seem, i was fascinated with its symmetry and the curvature of the object. In keeping with this theme i decided to morph the original object into something still symmetrical though slightly more simplified. Thus the object to a cylinder, then to a rectangle, and then the square to a flat . The colour graduation was added for aesthetic value. The plain white colour of paraffin wax is (for myself) domestic and mundane. If it were in a pure white gallery space then it would become something else.

I also new that i was making a work to go around a pillar and hence the idea of the object morphing as it wound itself around the space was appealing. The floating wax objects gave the work another dimension by lifting it away from the wall or the floor. I enjoy the idea that the viewer has to rotate them self around the work to view the whole instillation as a lot of sculpture is still looked at from only one or two angles then passed by.

As I am an indoors type of person I have chosen to explore the environment which is my kitchen. Using photography and cropping I will explore micro abstractions in this room. I will also investigation the social impact on this environment, in particular interventions created by my fellow housemates. These interventions portray the quirky behaviour of the tenants but also the attempts to personalise the space.

Clay in the Courtyard

Walking within the RMIT courtyard concentrates the mind. For a ceramic student I wanted to incorporate my ceramic work into the Art and the Environment courtyard project.

The RMIT courtyard encompasses sections of the old Melbourne Gaol. After taking lots of photographs I wondered if i would have the inspiration to undertake my project. It worked because I kept coming back to a tree with a the plaque near it describing four hanged prisoners burial site close to the tree. The gaol's hospital wall was also very close to the tree and the graves. So coming from a health background I wanted to use bandages in my project.

The tree is for the tree of life. Not only have I included the bandaged tree but also two ceramic trees which I built last year. I like them because thy have a figurative quality about them.

The plaque incorporates the hanged prisoners Budd, Oldring, Ross and Murray and gives a reality to their death.

The three bandaged branches also have a figerative quality, the arms and trunks of the hanged men.Bandages also talk about an altered physical and psychological state - the men's violet deaths.

Clay comes from the earth and the bandages when dipped into a porcelain clay slip and fired became the men's bones lying under the tree. The bandaged altered by a ceramic/clay process return the men to the earth.

Life (tree), life and change (bandages), death (plaque), dissolving into the earth (clay bones made from the bandages).