Concentric (2010)
3 screen installation | Stereo sound by Danny Griffith | Carriage Works
By 2010, my work with the relationships between performance, subjectivity and narrative had led me to develop a number of strategies I employed to complicate the relationship between screen and physical space. Emerging out of my auto-fiction, self as other performance work during the 2000s, my narratives of self expanded and led me towards broader communal narratives of place. Perhaps it was a sign of age or my rural upbringing but this path ultimately led to the Australian history of landscape art post European settlement.
In reading about the origins of this tradition I became very interested in the natural science artists and cartoonists of the convict period. I was surprised to learn just how few images of convicts existed. For despite the centrality of this period to the mythology and history of Australia less than fifty images survived that dealt specifically with convict life. This meant for my first site-specific work in Sydney I had to deal with our convict past. Greater Sydney was the home of our convict roots and with the theme of labour in mind, given i was working in the city’s former railyards, I wanted to find an image that could represent the hidden history of convict labour that had laid the city's foundations.
It was a little known fact that treadmills were used in Sydney, Brisbane and Tasmania. They were an extremely arduous form of punishment and whilst they were commonly used for the grinding of grain they were also used for the express purpose of torture with no utility derived from the labour. The treadmill was the departure point for this work. It was an image that resonated with me strongly, echoing as it did the recurrent motifs of entrapment and circularity that were present in much of my work. From that beginning the three images making up the installation dealt with the site in a series of steps from Sydney to Redfern and to Carriage Works itself. I wanted to deal with the multiple narratives of place and identity that intersected there. I tried in my installation to find poetic means of evoking hidden histories of labour embedded in the site in a series of concentric circles.
Firstly there was the very specific place of the carriage works in the Australian labour movement. Legendary former Prime Minister Ben Chifley was a train driver in Sydney and one of the leaders of the 1917 general strike that began at Redfern and involved 97000 workers at its peak. The strike began over the institution of a time and motion study, a 'Taylorist' initiative that saw the use of a card to record the movements of all staff during work time. These cards were the spark that led to the prolonged general strike and ultimately Chifley's dismissal for his role in it.
The suburb of Redfern is also the home of Australia's most famous and long standing urban Aboriginal community. Whilst members of the Gadigal tribe have occupied the land now called Redfern since before European settlement, the train yards were also partly responsible for concentrating this settlement in the post-invasion period as Aboriginal men came looking for work and camped nearby.
Finally the treadmill (fabricated for me by my Dad, Adrian Redfern), located the installation in the misguided sentimentality of our convict mythology.
*The work was another of the long series of video trompe l'œil works I have made: Tragic, Stonewall, OW!, Pining, I’ve come. along way as well as others not represented in the selection I have used for my website.