Seven Days of Packaging

I collected the packaging of various foods I consumed and made a self portrait, using watercolours.

Photo: Jessica Maurer “I am supposed to be what I read, what I listen to, what I look at” Bourriaud, N. 2002 POSTPRODUCTION Lukas and Sternberg, New York “I am what I am attached to” Latour, B. 2012 An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns Harvard University Press, Cambridge Massachusetts “You are what you eat” Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote, in Physiologie du Gout, ou Meditations de Gastronomie Transcendante, 1826 “It is this mysterious force called life that is responsible for “thoroughly transforming” the edible object…into the eater” Bennett, J. 2010 Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things Duke University Press, Durham North Carolina

Paradise Found

While making work for the show and negotiating beauty and content, a doco played for 2 weeks on the ABC; Paradise Found. It is a super piece of film making about the arts of Islam, architecture and history. I was gobsmacked throughout, ashamedly admitting there was so much that I didn't know about the Islamic influence on all Europe, and much of the world. Had my education been deficient? We find paradise through understanding, through seeing and loving. My world is enhanced by my vision and exultation that we are all in this together, each individual one of us, at different stages, co-existing. The doco made me understand that art in mosques was there to uplift the viewer and contemplate beauty itself. The spires leading to heaven, closer to God.

I am not religious, except about my committment to the earth itself.

But this program helped make me accept what I had made.

SHOP

What is this? A simulated display of a Shop. In the Gallery. Only silly, dare I say subversive? I didn't even know I was making it, until I did...another case of synchronicity, where I found the shelving and it exactly matched the shelving in the MCA shop at that time. I have always had a special fetishised attraction to all Museum shops, their haughty standards, they are so aquisitional, and the MCA store was no different. The arrangements and curious oddities remind me of Wunderkammers, but it is all about commerce. It's essentially a market for expensive designer items. And so, what is art? I have questions. There were a number of nice smelling things, as well as fresh fruit and vegetables.

The doctor is in

Bus ticket collection
Printed numbers in water


I collected Metro Ten tickets because I liked that they printed out the exact time of the transaction. I used the services of Column 8 in the Sydney Morning Herald to acquire more tickets. I found there were other people who had been collecting for years. I wanted to map out every minute of every hour of the day that the buses run. I cut out the time and pasted it on to sticks, shown here. I never completed every minute of the day, but I got close. I think they matched the ghastly laminex counters in the gallery.