Best of Cockatoo Island - Biennale, Sydney

 

 

Nadia Myre - The Scar Project. 2005-2012

 

Artist Statement

The Scar Project (2005–ongoing) is an ongoing interactive art installation where people are invited to create representations of their scars – whether physical, emotional, psychological or spiritual. Participants sew the shape of their scar onto canvas using various fibres and threads, then write down the story of how they got their scars, and how their wounds effected or changed them. Over the last seven years, I have led Scar Project labs with diverse groups of people in a number of contexts – art galleries, youth and cultural centres, prison healing circles, public schools, and so on. During this time, I have gathered more than 800 scar canvases and stories, exhibiting collections in galleries and museums in Canada and the USA. I see this as a ‘slow research’ project – a grassroots survey of how people describe their wounds, both linguistically and symbolically. It has become a study in symbology and raised many questions: Can signs describe hurt across cultures and continents? Will regional specificity surface in the scarred canvases and texts? Will the symbols collected in Australia differ, mirror or resonate with the existing ones from North America? Ultimately, The Scar Project is a vehicle for sharing personal traumas in a space, which is simultaneously contemplative and transformative.

 

Li Hongbo - Ocean of Flowers. 2012

 

Artist Statement

Desire causes damage, damage results in hatred, hatred accumulates conflicts, conflict leads to war. Weapons are for war, not merely defend yourself but also to annihilate others. However all people are born of lust and destroyed by the same thing. This is the formation of blood and tears from thousands of years of human history and suffering, but also as the result. The ‘flower’ in my work looks so bright and grandstanding, whether people can really comprehend the damage hidden behind it. When the muzzle points to any creature, no matter for what purpose, it represents the end of life or a painful struggle. We are all losers when the fall of lives reveal in our sight. Where there is a life, strong or weak, long or short, large or small, coarse or fine, near or far, visible or invisible, born or to be born, all should be lived with infinite kindness and a heart to love. Do not do harm to others because of your own selfishness. The designer of AK47 once said that the purpose of manufacturing weapons is always for self-defence, not to kill. If this principle can be widely accepted, the world will not need weapons.

 

 

Peter Robinson

 

Peter Robinson employs polystyrene to investigate the gallery as site. Scale is manipulated, presenting contradictions in weight and strength which often have the effect of destabilising the viewer’s sense of perception. The works are often massive and require teams of people working together to physically structure the work and solve problems, creating a sense of community.

 

 

 

Philip Beesley - Hylozoic Series: Sibyl, 2012

 

 

Beesley’s ‘Hylozoic Series’ is an interdisciplinary body of work that integrates lightweight, digitally fabricated textile structures and interactive microprocessor technology (touch sensors, LEDs, shape-memory alloy). These projects are a hybrid of sculpture, engineering, experimental chemistry and architecture. Working with the concept of hylozoism – the belief that all matter in the universe has a life of its own – Beesley creates interactive environments that respond to the actions of the audience, offering a vision of how buildings in the future might move, think and feel. His built environments begin to address the subject/object relationship in such a confounding way because the so-called objects are now responding to human presence, thus giving the work almost subject status.

 

 

Adam Cvijanovic - The River, 2012

 

Artist Statement

I have an intransigent attraction to painting and, what’s even worse, to depiction. It is a romance whose explanations and excuses can be best made after the fact. I can only hope that, rather than revelling in obsolescence, it is a touchstone of some root activity, a sort of mantra through time, a call and response with resonance that, while perhaps vestigial, is real to the life around me. There is great pleasure for me in describing the things we see – mountains, rivers, falling buildings, dusty skies – letting them become a place to find, a road or a valley, with one colour sitting on another colour, the thing itself, pigment all the way to the border of peripheral vision. I have always been drawn to images that fill the room – frescos, panoramas, and fullscreen cinema. Creating space, not just an arbitrary and abstracted space but also a perspectival space, a space with a point. With architecture as scaffold and tether, using scale to blur the boundary between the painting, the environment, and the viewer. Walls that say: 'I am plaster and I am a window, I am a border and a vision.' A world where artifice is overwhelming but fragile, and intention is open to the exposure of its true material self.

 

Tiffany Singh - Knock On The Sky Listen To The Sound, 2012

 

Artist Statement

Knock on the sky listen to the sound is a Buddhist proverb of spiritual significance, first heard on a journey over the Himalayas in Ladakh, where the sky was so close we felt like we could knock on it. It seems an appropriate title, as the artwork transforms the space into an open-air musical instrument that, on initial contact, sounds as though it is coming from the sky. Chimes are hung, often in great numbers, near places of religious significance such as temples and shrines. The intention of the chimes is to allow the winds of fortune or ‘chi’ energy to flow freely, as wind chimes can influence how chi flows through a space. Here the chimes are believed to help slow positive energy as it approaches the building, inviting it inside from all four directions. The notion of pilgrimage is seeded in this work, as the chimes journey between the sites through audience participation. Framing part of this work as a pilgrimage suggests the proposal of the new Jungian archetype for the pilgrimage as a common human experience. The application of multiple sites creates a non-static developmental work that externally generates its own tools, channels and co-authorship.