Exhibition: Spare room
Elizabeth Bay House,
Sydney.
Artist Sue Pedley…
…fuses and recycles different places, several cultures, and suggests that there is a link between the lives here at the house and elsewhere.
Exhibition catalogue, p.10
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Oyster shells, gathered from Sydney and her home state Tasmania, are piled high on the four-poster double bed of the main bedroom. Next door, Kelp rests on a simpler double bed. The white single bed frame in another room holds the outer leaves of sweet corn.
The beds of past Colonials have been transformed into middens of their cultural connections. There is no spare room for more.
Each midden is a complete object for contemplation, beautiful in its subtle colouring, texture and overall form. I am told to see them by day, lit by the sun streaming through the enormous bedroom windows.
In another room, hangs a huge contact print Sue made by holding light sensitized paper against its huge window. This piece suggests the landscape as it would have been when the house was built.
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Arriving home from Elizabeth Bay House last night, I sketched a plan for interweaving stories between a time-lined map of Antarctica and the Thesaurus.
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I receive another Antarctic story that interweaves with my own experience.
A map can indicate the numbers of stories offered, marking some as public, some as private.