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| Granny's Barra, 2015, located at the artist's residence |
This installation uses steel and natural elements to speak to common themes of the artist's work - those of death and rebirth, and of the dire necessity for humanity to reposition itself back into restorative natural rhythm, before it manages in its insanity - acknowledged as yet not in each individual bosom but only in everybody else's - to ruin the whole fucking game via collective psychosis.
Keen fans of the artist's poetry will note the reappearance of the blue hydrangea. In the poem Scuttlebutts and Plop, published in The New Yorker in 2016, the flower symbolises the next evolution of the species, while in Gloppy Tankard, from The Paris Review in the same year, the hydrangea indicates the renewal coming from that which Westerners most lack - imagination and the ability to follow breadcrumbs into dark forests. It signifies the 'left hand not knowing what the right is doing and unwilling to anyway, even if it was possible, being totally drunk on its own limited perspective,' which was the loose theme for her most recent exhibition at Hobart's MONA, featuring pieces made from string.
The steel used in this piece is literally from her dearly departed grandmother's wheelbarrow. Once a vivid yellow and surviving years as a well-kept tool in her granny's gardening repertoire and stored religiously in a shed, the barrow lasted barely 10 years when in the untidy possession of the artist, lying about any old where in the rain before being appropriated for one of the most stunning and profound examples of her glimpf period.
Somehow we're sure her grandmother won't mind.
