Caudex
GROUP EXHIBITION, SCULPTURE AND INSTALLATION. Praxis Gallery, BOWDEN, SOUTH AUSTRALIA 2020
On Being an Artist (11 Actions) Praxis Gallery, Bowden, South Australia
Action 6: Functional Artifice
Design a tool/machine from a mythical/religious narrative for the world today.
Follow your traditions
The object should look like what it does.
Conceived as a set of tools to better navigate this epoch of great upheaval, Caudex is a series of contemplative and playful forms that hint at a lost purpose. Tools are things that call us to action, and these speculative objects call us in a way that contemplates our relationship with the living world, retracing dormant lines of meaning that lie within us. Similarly, Ark gently acknowledges overlooked, discarded things that sit between human and plant realms. As sculptural metaphors these vessels were conceived to carry these markers of relationship, remembering what is sacred in this interrelationship.
The work together articulates a vocabulary of forms and affects: textiles, ceramics, cast metals and botanical specimens. These sculptural objects are arranged together in a speculative narrative reimagining the way that we live with our own fragility and doubt by exploring the threads connecting ecology and art making.
