The Age    Culture  Art & design
Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award

March 10, 2004 — 11.00pm
Werribee Park, K Road, Werribee, until May 9

This year's Lempriere contains five or six strong works. In a class of 25, this is not an impressive score.
The outstanding work is meme by Phin Murphy, Marie Sierra and Jim Sinatra. Cobweb brushes are packed into refractive bands in the form of a cocoon.
Three of these large organic nests are hoisted high into the sensuous boughs of lemon-scented gums, apparently bursting with wriggles like clusters of caterpillars or some hairy slugspawn in iridescent envelopes. This strange woven construction compares with the huge Cocoon by Cat Macleod and Michael Bellemo. A great egg is screwed together from thin bands of wood, cloaking a volume with a permeable exoskeleton.
You peer inside and it's tempting - especially for children - to enter, as if spermatozoa hard-wired to impregnate the ovum.
I'm not sure about the vertical poles that transfix this tender haven. They work as engineering, but reduce the magic of the organic temple to an olive stabbed by too many toothpicks.
The form might have worked better if suspended entirely and without the shafts.

Another excellent work is Shift by Gerard McCourt. A sheer plane displays a photograph of the Werribee Mansion.
When approached within four metres by a person of average height, the photograph can be lined up to match exactly the proportions of the Victorian building.
So while most of the vista is reality, a thin strip of artifice is arrantly inserted into your unmediated field of truth.

Amanda Triffitt's Travellers, a cluster of lilac domes under the trees, is very pretty, with some slight connotations of mushrooms and forest floor growth and a rippling effect created by the different sizes.

Life forms are curiously replicated in Mathew Harding's Symbiosis, seeds writ large and rusty, maybe a bit corny.

The winning work has none of the poetry of these five. Richard Goodwin's Prosthetic Apartment B is a vessel hoisted on steel scaffolding over four tents.
It may seek to refer to refugees but, with its stainless steel and handsome skulling vessel, only speaks a language of classy technical contraptions.
The work is derivative, borrowing from Tony Trembath's 25 Telecom Tents of the 1970s, but with none of the humour and conceptual rigour of Trembath's installation.

The remaining work is as bad and sometimes even more literal, more clunky, like the ugly block by Anne Ferguson, naively and temerariously dubbed Ithaca.

Andrew Rogers's Weightless is a large metal plane that behaves like a piece of cloth. You marvel at the bizarre behaviour of the material. There's little point wondering about its meaning.

Julie Callinicos's Dreamers is an unsightly bunch of metal cushions floating in the pond, now garnished with water marks and bird-droppings.

Michele Beevors's Psycho Killer and Friends shows old heroes of animation, like Mickey Mouse, in camouflage and sporting guns.
The allegory of popular culture having a link with US military imperialism is worth exploring; but the treatment seems supercilious and complacent.

Arthur Wicks's solar-powered boat that runs on a track like a train is a trifling toy of flippant allegorical aspect.

Deobrah Edwards's well-crafted Mind-Set enlarges the headphones with ornaments in a way that doesn't seem to tally with any credible interpretation. It's handsome corn.

Mathieu Gallois's Blind recreates in white the normally colourful play equipment of suburban parks and gardens.

Gallois's bland treatment, with amateurish surfaces, picks up on no useful institutional associations.

The transformation from joyful design to cryptic art reveals the dead hand of artificial conceptualism.

Heather B. Swann's Man Barrow Forkers maybe relates old tilling equipment to the sexual propitiation of the harvest, by making the rusty farm equipment a bit convulsive in shape.
But the work is sentimental, with the nostalgic pseudo-antiques somehow cruelled by their replication in an array. The number seems arbitrary.

Louisa Dawson's Itinerary/Itinerant is a snaking stack of suitcases. It's so corny: technical cleverness and capricious imagery in the service of mannerism, almost as corny as Endra Che-Kahn and Marco Mattucei's Contraption.

Jodie Goldring deserves credit for approaching the mansion; however, her woven tyre-rubbers don't relate to the building
.
Lisa Roet's allegory of evolution versus God seems facile and pompous, like the hand-of-God theme of Mike Nicholls.

Richie Kuhaupt and Geoffrey Drake-Brochman's Torso in marble and stainless steel doesn't successfully evoke the past or present but falls between both in a pit of bad taste.

robert.nelson@artdes.monash.edu.au

 

 

To visit the Virtual Gallery Wing dedicated to the 3 man Boat machine click HERE