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Clare Belfrage
Bronwyn Goss
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Adrian Jones
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Susan Purdy
Sue Saxon
Liz Williamson

ADRIAN JONES

Artist's Statement

To create an artwork which embodies the way difficult narratives trail off into unresolved territories.  To persist in the idea that artmaking can do so in a way that strictly linear textual narrative cannot. To be more interested in things that trail off...  It’s the parts that trail off that human lives consist of.

Finding the name of an engineer in quotidian circulation (and usually they are not) 100 years after completing his work became the subject of Water Carrier. In Charles Yelverton O’Connor’s last project, water travels uphill 550 kilometres to Coolgardie from Perth.  Water is drawn quietly, whispering from reservoir to reservoir. Whispers during his last days caused him to shoot himself. He wafted dead in waters off Robbs Jetty, south of Fremantle, the last smell in his nostrils from the slaughterhouse nearby. 



Water Carrier Iron, mops, wicks, canvas panels, water, earth



Detail

CV

Exhibitions & Projects

1999       Gargoyles, Joondalup Campus Sports Centre, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia.

1998       Window Text, State Library car park windows.

1997       Auto/Biography, Scapular Gallery Nomad.

1997       Cadaver, Festival of Perth Exhibition, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts.

1996       Artworks for the Hay Street Mall, City of Perth commission.

1995       Acrobat, Mao Tse Tung Hour - a project by Hiram To, Ipswich Art Gallery, Queensland.

1995    Songs of the dearly departed, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, The University of Western Australia.

1993    The Nature of non-Material Evidence, Fifth Australian Sculpture Triennial, Grainger Museum, The University of Melbourne.

1992       Founder’s Café, Terracists - Temporal Public Art project curated by Urban Thresholds

1991    Project Text-Tiles, Perth Central Railway Station.

1987    Chronicles of a Golden Age, The Performance Space, Sydney.

1985   The Death of Four British Anthropologists, Praxis, Fremantle.

Curator's Statement

Adrian Jones 'homage' to CY O'Connor is a deeply ambivalent reflection on the place of water in the Australian psyche. On the one hand, there is the marvel of the pipeline that travels uphill to Kalgoorlie, reflected in the everyday wonders of osmosis and evaporation (both figuring prominently in the icon of the Coolgardie safe). And on the other hand, water is a threat to structures of containment that make a civilised society, both physical in dams and pipes, and psychological in control of emotions. The chaos of water in Jones' installation complements O'Connor's own stormy end.

Mandaring Weir in overflow

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