JAN FIELDSEND 

The Living Sparkle.
Fieldwork #2 Kamay/Botany Bay 2015

Until 22  August  2015

Years ago I found a small book in an opportunity shop called Fieldwork in Animal Biology, which as it happens includes guidelines for fieldwork on marine platforms. It predicted a direction in my artwork; amplified and extended in conversations with Marie McMahon and further book research on geology, biology and history back in the studio.

The Living Sparkle is the second work to arise from fortnightly visits to Cape Banks and Cruwee Cove out at Kamay/Botany Bay near the end of Botany Road. A marine platform where underwater gardens are exposed, each rock pool is a unique multicultural assemblage of animals and plants. Delicate anemone pink tendrils, stripy self-housing sea animals, startling pink, apricot and burgundy algae all sway under the glistening brine.

This is the color and texture of my work, inspired by the Australian ikebana of Norman Sparnon and built using the display and presentation techniques of window-dressers. It is an articulation of my fieldwork expressed in the eco-system of Botany Road’s beginning.

Jan Fieldsend, 2015

 

ARTHUR APANSKI AND TONY TWIGG

Hangover

 

July - January 2016 at Darlington Installation Project

 Arthur Apanski takes a moral position in his art.  And it is a principled stand. He is against war, the greed that motivates it and along with it the suffering it delivers. My contribution to our collaboration was pragmatic in comparison. I was the one to offer Arthur’s skeleton wrapped in Australian bank notes a chair.

 

 

With deft precision Arthur’s works confront the viewer, in this case with the idea of money. For Arthur money, at best a necessary evil is the route of man’s inhumanity to man. Although it is ironic that once the war over money is fought it is money that we send the consequent refugees left struggling to begin life a new. Money spiralling in ever more incomprehensible numbers defines our homes as crippling mortgages and it’s money that we carelessly spend on a coffee, a movie, even lunch as a diversion from the sobering burden it becomes. Arthur has it right; we are “money to the bone”. The moral, like all morals however is open to interpretation and pragmatic presentation..

Arthur stood back from his work, examined it briefly. Satisfied he picked up his mobile phone, to arrange his next appointment. Like Elvis he had left the building and me wondering if one mans hangover might be another man’s inheritance.