National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | The National Sculpture Prize and Exhibition 2005

I wanted to capture an aspect of natural history in a state of suspended animation. I was hoping it might be beautiful, but also sad, as if the software I’d used had inadvertently caused its demise. It would be simultaneously alive and deathly. Of course, sculpture has always contended with this problem. As much as I wanted to reiterate the very objecthood and kinaesthesia that sculpture tends to engage in one way or another, I also wanted to cast a shadow of doubt across the current tide of digital effects and media.

I decided that a manta ray would be suitably complicated – they seem to drift between post-millennial spookiness and weird evolution, a natural phenomenon that is already coloured by the way we understand modern design. They are obscure but familiar, gentle by nature but large enough to be intimidating. They are often referred to as devil rays.

I started working with an industrial designer to produce the sculpture. I wanted geometry to do most of the work for us – in other words, to build a manta ray in the same way that one might use compound curves to design the body of a sports car, to describe the surface in a way that was almost too perfect.

It was important that we followed a biologically accurate template. We selected a moment from some underwater footage that captured the graceful, downward thrust of the creature’s fins. Working from magazine articles, and drawings and maquettes I had made, we then created a virtual description of the fish, tracing the various lines of its body to create a surface that was symmetrical and seamless. This information was passed on to a computer-controlled milling machine that literally carved the manta ray from solid blocks of foam, actualising a form in real-space that corresponds exactly to the shape described by the software we were using.

It is a digitally produced sculpture, caught attempting to swim back into an analogue universe. I like to think of it as a distant relative of the sweeping roof above Le Corbusier's chapel at Ronchamp. A number of my friends commented that it looks like an evolved surfboard. Either way, we mostly agree that it appears to be acutely modern, but suspiciously odd.

Photography: Adam Reich

Double self-portrait is a sculptural re-exploration of concepts first undertaken through a body of aquatints while on a Harkness Fellowship in 1983–85 at Columbia University. At that time it was my intention to take back ground previously thought to be the domain of the painter, namely their facility to distort scale in an illusionary space. Giacometti explored similar issues by the placement of figures within an inferred landscape, resulting in the manipulation of our perception of their scale. In the case of Double self-portrait, the viewer is drawn into the pictorial space created by the black frame and may begin to imagine the two portraits to be of vast proportions.

Double self-portrait also explores our perception of self and its many incarnations. The recurring fascination I have with ‘anima’ – the sculptural study of personality and more specifically its resulting investigation of the female side of the male personality – is a focus for Double self-portrait. For many years this has been a constant and ongoing theme in my studio practice.

Photography: John Gollings

I am interested in chaos and complexity theories, where simple units form complex systems and if you follow those systems it somehow connects us to the universe. In Woven water: submarine landscape I want to create the illusion of the ocean and its currents. The piece is commenting on the environmental impact tourism has on animals and our planet. Although the feeling evoked in a viewer ‘immersed’ in the artwork is peace and tranquillity, the frozen and dry nature of these sea creatures hints at their ghostlike and melancholic end.

Photography: Ross Rudesch Harley

The correct distance between objects

is critical, whether that distance is physical, cultural or emotional.

Two objects too close to each other become one,

Two objects too far apart no longer relate to each other.

Intrigued by experiments with chance relationships, accidental spatial configurations and a type of spontaneous feng shui, the focus of the work is not only the objects – whether found, made or observed – but the space around, between and inside the objects, being the cultural or emotional significance of the objects.

I often observe Australia from outside Australia; I want to see how it is perceived from another position and also from cultures within Australia.

Following an invitation to work in Vietnam in 1998, and my experience of living in Vietnam, the work references Australia’s involvement with Vietnam and Vietnamese migrants in Australia. This work deals with characters, events and locations that are significant in that which has helped shape Australia: Gallipoli, Mabo, Banjo Patterson, Maralinga, etc.

American crater near Hanoi #2 is a work that deals with the physical, emotional and historical nature of space and place. Since my first visits to Vietnam I have been documenting bomb craters. While measuring, filming, tracing and photographing these emotive and politically charged spaces one discovers a morbid fascination with these shapes, and a haunting beauty about their physical, cultural and emotional form. This space, once occupied, is undergoing constant change.

American crater near Hanoi #2 is motivated by recent involvement with a non-profit organisation, PROJECT RENEW in Quang Tri Province Central Vietnam. Their primary objectives are Mine Risk Education (MRE), and to clear Quang Tri Province and neighbouring regions of landmines and other unexploded ordinances.

Photography: Ionas Kaltenbach

Flowers are organs of plant procreation – they attract insects to act as vectors for fertilisation. But flowers also appeal

Flowers are organs of plant procreation - they attract insects to act as vectors for fertilisation. But flowers aslo appeal to humans. To us, a flower’s beauty is defining of all that is pure and joyful in the world. The majesty of the annual – the flower that blooms with all its vitality for one short moment before withering away – plays out the tragedy of life in a single act: ‘we grow, we are beautiful, we die’. The solitary flower domesticated in a pot is emblematic of suburban iconography. Flowerpots are living garden objects that we have brought closer to us, onto the patio, where we can tend them carefully and enjoy their presence at close quarters.

The squared-off flowers of Floribots are well removed from the organic domain. They are mechanoids. However, in a way they too can play out the drama of life and death – bloom and wither – and they can show us other things as well...

Floribots consists of 128 computer-controlled robot origami flowers arranged in an eight-by-sixteen grid spread over thirty-five square metres of floor space. Each robot flower is able to extend telescopically from a rest condition to grow one metre vertically, then suddenly invert its origami ‘flower’ into an open bloom state. The unit can also re-contract back down into its latent state and refold its origami bloom back into the bud condition.

Floribots acts as an interactive collective organism with ‘hive mind’ characteristics. It is capable of sensing audience movement and of adapting its behaviours accordingly. It is a ‘field of flowers’ that dances in unison, with choreography provided by its embedded microcontroller. The flower matrix can exhibit complex wave propagation behaviours as well as describing responsive surface features and entering periods of chaotic motion. The Floribot mind is able to control transitions between these states and can ‘learn’ as it runs over time by acclimatising itself to an installation site and developing a particular set of behaviour preferences.

Photography: Geoffrey Drake-Brockman

Selving could be splitting, halving or doubling a temporary manifestation of a continual transfer of sorts. Selving could be a to and fro of thin air contained in plastic forms in a scale approximate to your body. A transfer might occur between you and it as you imagine yourself in there. So where are you, where am I, where does that and this self start or finish? If you imagine yourself in there or refracted and multiplied in a mirror, or you imagine yourself left for the worms in a wooden box, or perhaps you imagine yourself standing nearby in your skin, or perhaps find yourself in a daydream someplace faraway. I like to imagine ghosts floating through walls. If I could know the frequency of the wall matter could I float through? Would it be slow or fast? Maybe I could lose all definition, maybe lose myself. When I was working on this piece a little fly got trapped in the plastic, which I didn’t notice until after I had titled the show in a general way Flowers, flies and someone else. It was a strange coincidence but it seemed that the fly was there to stay.

Photography: Robert Colvin

Folded and glued like free-standing ‘point of a sale’ advertisements, hundreds of crisp, white cardboard cut-outs make up the floor installation Bonsai landscape. The objects are precisely placed so they turn, robot-like, in strictly controlled conformity to each other. From one particular viewpoint the viewer sees a dense, miniature forest of repetitive, tree-like imagery; from the opposite view the folds create an intricate panorama of cloned geometry that transforms and shifts like a tonal animation as the viewer moves around the ensemble.

There are three protagonists. Scattered throughout a forest of bonsai trees are images of an inscrutable rock in dialogue with a fire hydrant.

Together the components inscribe a shape on the gallery floor, reminiscent of the monoculture of commercial forestry, configured to map the shape of the 2003 bushfires in and around Canberra.

The bonsai image, nature fictionalised, is derived from a photograph of a grove of trees I noticed growing along a gully on a hillside in Utah, in the United States. The fire hydrant and rock are someone’s valiant attempt at ‘urban landscaping’ in a vast, desert-like car park nearby.

Together these images suggest that, like Leonardo da Vinci’s stains on a wall, meaning or narrative can be ascribed to anything our imaginations care to interpret. They remind us that nature is an economic unit, a throwaway consumable. It is also culturalised, destructive, exoticised and metaphysical. It is a biological system that we inhabit as deluded animals, human frailty ‘in control’.

Image: Detail

Caryatid Minotaur is ostensibly an arch, yet the caryatids are too close together to allow a person to pass. The tension set up by this contradiction invites reflection on the mirror-finished horns of this dilemma. Reflection in all meaning of the word.

I have been fascinated by Greek mythology from an early age and I have previously worked with the Icarus and Minotaur myth. They all seem to resonate very well when contemplating the myth and confusion of contemporary life and art politics, as well as what one might euphemistically call the real world. This sculpture is also important to me because of the introduction of curved lines and surfaces. It opens up a whole new field for me and I am excited by the possibilities that I am now pursuing in a series of maquettes.

It is important to me that a work is open to layers of interpretation, and that it is conceptually rich and invites speculation. Of equal importance is the physical presence of the sculpture as an icon that exercises its power through other than intellectual modes of perception.

Image: Maquette for 'Caryatid Minotaur' 2004 stainless steel, private collection, Perth

Photography: Dr Michael Prichard

Moth forms the next work in my exploration of exoskeleton and prosthetic architecture.

NASA moon photographs depicting a sole astronaut roaming next to his flimsy vehicle are evoked. Travelling on a sea of equations the journey into space is made. Similarly, all aesthetic judgements are born of number and calculus.

The language of numbers in Moth intersects with my obsessive-compulsive past.

Moth is about metamorphosis and the journey towards light or a solution.

Such is the short life of the Moth emerging from its exoskeleton carapace to fly its erratic vectors before succumbing to the strange attractor of pure light.

Moth is a central metaphor for the human condition, which combines a Moth Boat with the prospect of the viewer as a driver.

My older sister would, in a three-dimensional Superman comic sort of typeface, loudly proclaim her ownership by writing her name over and over on her things. Mum became particularly aggrieved when her graffiti branding colonised her school textbooks, obliterating title and author. I remember Steff’s response to Mum’s protests: ‘It’s only writing, that’s what books are’.

Perhaps it’s the overlaying and assertion of independent thought on the existing that allows us to make our own structures and find our own meanings. It is how we shuffle language and symbol to form blocks of pattern, how we stack shades of opinion, one on another, how we lay facts and fictions side by side, how we order, rank and classify the views of others that allows us to find space – a little void to calibrate our own experience, a place to put our own thoughts.

Photography: Peter Whyte