This work echoes my earlier painting and sculpture that featured figures precariously balanced or upside down. Inverting a figure – whether human, creature or in this case both – invites new perspectives by throwing established readings off kilter. In this work, the status quo is literally turned on its head.
We are living in a topsy-turvy world, through a year of immense social and political change. The sculpture responds to society’s current re-thinking of the world and our relationship with it, past and future, with a deliberately raw sense of immediacy that suggests old structures being usurped.
The protagonist is emblematic. The standing or mounted male figure being ubiquitous in civic spaces across the western world. When turned upside down, the decorative accoutrements of the horse’s carefully groomed tail and rider’s shiny ornament become superfluous in this new reality, left hanging in space.
The work can be interpreted politically as a comment on current shifts in world power, or perhaps on global cultural debates around the fate of colonial statues as people around the world call for recognition and equality. In the end, however, the viewer will bring their own meaning to it: the aim is not to preach but to provoke.
Courtesy of Australian Galleries
wood, plaster, metal, wax string, polyester
58 x 20 x 80 cm
Finalist
Rodney Pople, in conversation with Sebastian Goldspink, discusses his work Usurped. Recorded on 7 November 2021 at the 20th Anniversary Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize exhibition, Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf.
Judges of the 20th Anniversary Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize: Dr Lara Strongman (Director Curatorial and Digital, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia), Joanna Capon OAM (Art Historian, Curator and Industrial Archaeologist) and Jenny Kee AO (Artist and Fashion Designer).
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