Send them to the Colonies...

Just over a year ago, I had a space in the Lismore Regional Art Gallery to do a collaborative work with Liz Stops, the fabulous ceramic artist whose work you'll find in just about any Australian Vogue Living or Inside Out magazine or at Planet  and Brenda May Gallery in Sydney. By the time it came around to thinking about the work, I was well and truly romantically involved with chairs, so the initial proposal and its necessary clay fondling took a back seat and something quite different evolved. Liz and I installed in separate windows of the gallery but shared a title and rationale that went something like this: 'using the language of plants and the landscape to discuss issues of colonisation.' It was called 'The Colonisers'.

Hand-drawn wallpaper and embroidered (yes I did it myself) Belgian linen featuring the 'mile-a-minute vine' - a rapid invasive weed species in our local area. There are no 'before' shots of this chair, it was found next to a skip out the front of a house. We loaded it on the ute and made a quick getaway. It's not stealing when it's rubbish, its 'making good use of the things that we find, things that the everyday folk leave behind', dum te de dum te dee dum te de dum.....   Right now I'm being told that writing this will have us sent to the 'penile' colonies. Ha ha, heaven forbid!