Artist as Outsider Cuckoo Farm Studios, Colchester Essex  August/September 2011

The work focused upon sending images via the internet to the curators where they were then inserted into containers and exhibited as if messages sent in bottles.

The series developed throughout the exhibition where each image fed the next from a remote site (Perth, WA to Colchester UK) via the internet as a data stream.

The communications emphasized elements of politics, culture and history both from Australia and the UK.

The imagery included data sets, symbolic forms, text, photographic reproductions of personal and internet images.

The final image includes Charles Chaplin an image of a wooden horse and three stick figures coloured in Red, Green and Blue (RGB) as ‘digital natives’.

The inclusion of Charles Chaplin was a reference back to my childhood. He considers an empty landscape at the end of a film emphasising both reflection and the movement towards an uncertain future, something I recall from seeing Chaplin’s films as a child.  The wooden horse is a reference to Mark Wallinger’s large scale sculpture of a white horse visible from the railway lines to and from London to Paris,

while the digital natives posed as toilet figurines stand facing the past, looking out and back towards the image of Chaplin.

Both symbols allude to excess, symbolic gesture and spectacle from the intimate to the extreme public.

Their hollow fragility encased within a mass produced vitrine (jar) where everything is reduced to commodity and the essence, suggestion, memory of experience or frame is encapsulated.

This work led to the development of ‘Message to the Oracle’, where the idea of communicating to an unknown recipient or hoping for some form of response as a human need to be heard or acknowledged is developed further.

medium; Digital print in glass bottles various dimensions.
The photographs of the installations were taken by the curators
Lisa Temple Cox & Katia Denysova
Outside Instal 1 to 8
including an image of Dr. Matthew Bowman from University of Essex
contemplating the installed work.
Curators of the show Lisa Temple-Cox & Katia Denysova
Forward to the catalogue written by Dr. Matthew Bowman