new symbols of nature

it had to happen at some point, and i think the time was right. 

plants have been dropped from the installation.

plants have been a very regular material in my work for some time now. perhaps to the point of becoming some sort of signature, where occasionally i am being referred to as the 'plant guy'. now there's a whole variety of good reasons to use plants in art, and it is something that will always be part of my repertoire. but as i have come to realise that my work is about systems, and the plants i use signify just one symbolic evocation of natural systems, i feel more free to let them go and pursue some different natural elements that also evoke symbolic meaning for natural systems.

i had started with logs, way back in 2008, as the starting point of natural materials in my work. natural materials that connote 'nature' and the archive of information contained therein. then i transitioned from those dead and discarded living materials, to plants that were actually alive. this introduced issues like the biophilia hypothesis into my work and was a more direct way of engaging with the 'natural', living world around us, or amongst us.

this next transition goes back in the other direction, in a way, by pursuing natural elements that are even less 'alive' (or perhaps even, less 'conscious') than either logs, wood or living plants. for this next show, with its connections to the architecture of the site, i am going to use rock as a material to represent the natural.

rocks are as equally of the natural world as a tiger, an orchid or a cloud. some theories have it that the world is in fact one functioning system, where all these natural elements - from rocks and sand and dirt, to oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide, to termites and kangaroos and humans - are all functioning together to make life possible on earth. they each facilitate the functioning of each other's collective environmental needs.

artist giuseppe penone describes rocks as liquid materials that appear to us as solid only because of our limited time frame of conscious awareness. in the grand scheme of universal time, a rock transitions through many stages in creation and destruction, only existing as a hard rock for the blink of an eye in the broad spectrum of time of the earth's lifespan.

also, i like the correlation between the rock as a natural element, and how we have unitised it into a cobblestone and used thousands to articulate our architectural environment - natural system coopted as cultural system. 

for this site, in the melbourne cbd, the obvious rock choice is bluestone.  this highly recognisable part of melbourne's architecture, especially from the gold rush era, is actually cooled lava from a volcano flow.

in the interest of stripping the work back to its elements a bit more - in contrast to a habit i have of overloading my work - this sketch is exploring the speaker cone as stripped down sound producer. it requires some sort of armature to stand up, so loses some of its potency i think. 

the desk lamps still seem to have more impact for me, so they remain first choice at the moment. i like the way they imply that the internal infrastructure of an office environment appears to be interrogating/investigating/nurturing the architectural building blocks of its own habitat. building blocks which are made of the earth, are natural, and form the foundation of its existence.