Future Fossils

For this exhibition I have tracked significant sites. Places significant to me - nothing grand, just places I frequent regularly in my daily life or that I frequent often in memory.

I've taken rubbings from these places. The footpath at my library, the gravel outside my studio, the tarseal in front of my home, the stucco exterior of a house I lived in 20 years ago. The rubbings mostly trace the products of quarries. Stone blasted from the ground and rendered fit for our urban environments.

These rubbings are wrapped as an exterior skin around 3-Dimensional assemblages of found objects, old frames and urban detritus. They have become object shapes which more or less describe what a work of art could look like. But just as drawing a bicycle doesn't make that drawing structurally sound or fit for riding, these objects imagine rather than represent reality. The potentiality of an imagined interior in these works plays on our expectations. We can guess at it, postulate an implicit history and meaning, but ultimately our guesses will be just that - conjectures on the work's inherent possibilities. (The interior often betrays the exterior.)

The exhibition title 'Future Fossil' refers to a fictional scenario that imagines a future civilisation reconstructing these works as found artefacts. The works are discovered and dislodged from sedimentary layers, unearthed from the ground and pieced together. They are disjointed, corroded by the destructive forces of time, and parts are obviously missing.

In proposing this fictional temporality, the work models our attempts to understand our present by looking back from an imagined future.