A show finished last Saturday at First Draft, where three artist presented three distinctive and unrelated bodies of work.
You enjoyed all three, for different reasons, Leah McPherson’s flip-book short films, a fantastic editing exercise activated by viewers, Josy Cavallaro’s flimsy visual statements and commentary on semantic peculiarities..which reminded you of speech bubbles, and Kirsten Bradley’s About Above.
About Above is what you want to talk about, starting from the maker:
Kirsten is one third of Cicada and the other half of Milkwood. Her tech savvy background clashed (or maybe melted) with cold morning and permaculture plans.
What came out of it is knowledge of light (as a videomaker) being cast onto mondane materials, cardboard and gaffa tape.
She says of her latest project:
About, above is a project that considers the plausibility of making natural systems out of cardboard. Drawing on our enduring fascination with the night sky and the space beyond, About, above prods the viewer with gentle questions. The project explores ideas regarding our emotive reactions to natural systems, and investigate our relationship with natural pattern- recognition and our capacity for wonder, in the face of disbelief.
A project in two parts, About, above invites the viewer into a world of lo-fi nature through participatory sculpture and installation. A suite of solar-powered cardboard planetariums in the streets of Sydney, and a camera obscura universe at Firstdraft Gallery both draw in part on early texts and representations of the night sky, as well as ideas of pattern, navigation, simulation, geocentricism and the peculiar nature of light.
About, above aims to consider how we choose to navigate through our worlds, and how we choose what it is that we see.
You tried in the past to get some answers for poignant questions regarding her practice, but the slow internet connection out west does not facilitate fast-paced reactions, and probably just as well, because you ‘probing’ her with definitions of “post-colonial guilt” in the face of investigations on landscape, belonging and interpretative personal paths missed the whole point..
it doesn’t matter what we think of it, is what it is, bigger and exponentially un-achievable more than we could even conject to assume.. it’s above..
uhmmm
you liked it, in a mesmerizing kind of way…to see the trees upside down through a simple whole in a cardboard sheet.
