This is a performative work composed from both movement and portals to memory. Conceptually the work seeks to affect, as well as intertwine the viewer in the processes of its construction.
Communion Hosts are used as a starting point for exploring themes connected to the temporality of the human body, memorialising and remembrance. As a sculpture, the work is composed of up to 5000 individual copper stems that pierce through and are connected to the Altar Breads.
The Hosts are stitched to rubbings of sepulchre texts and photographic portraits I created when doing research at Frenchs Forest Bushland and Rookwood Cemeteries. Some of the loaves are also inscribed with lamentations recorded on the surfaces of the hosts; these are at once symbolic of the fragility of the body as well as stand proxy for the bodies interred in the graves.
copper, communion wafers, paper, graphite, silk
80 x 80 x 40 cm
Finalist
Judges of the 2013 Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize: Nick Mitzevich (Director of the Art Gallery of SA) and Professor Ian Howard (College of Fine Arts, UNSW).
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