MARS Gallery exhibition

These are shots from a show I had in 2005 at [MARS] Gallery (Melbourne Art Rooms) in Port Melbourne. I mainly want to show the hand-made paper work that is on the right-hand wall in the first photo. As with almost all the images I've posted to the blog so far, they're images that I was planning to put on my website a few years ago. They never made it to the website, and I closed it down, but still had the images ready to put on the net.


The kimono and black panels on the left are the early part of the I Am Because We Are installation. (See this post for more details) In the middle of the image, in the corner, is a work called Let Down Your Hair. It's a Rapunzel-themed work. There's a plait of hair hanging from the ceiling and pooling on the floor.On the wall are hand-made sheets of paper with hair and various Rapunzel-related texts printed on them.

To the right on the wall is a different series of hair paper works. This was part of a work called Memento Vivere (remember that you (must) live, rather than the usual reminder that you must die). For this show I took sheets of the paper (which for the original work just featured the hair of the donors) and added the names of those who had donated the hair that was in each sheet of paper.

This is a close-up of the sock works:

The rest of the images are all of a work which is collectively called Long, straight, curly, fuzzy, snaggy, shaggy, ratty, matty, oily, greasy, fleecy, shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen, knotted, polka-dotted, twisted, beaded, braided, powdered, flowered and confettied, bangled, tangled, spangled and spaghettied. (The title comes from the title song of the musical Hair.) Each sheet is approximately 16x16cm so it's difficult to get details of individual sheets in an overall shot. The images are spirit prints where the image from a photocopy is treated with turpentine and run through a printing press. All the text and images are related to aspects of hair - sociological, religious, fictional, scientific, cultural, linguistic, etc.


This final image is a slightly distorted shot of a different configuration of the same series. This was the version in my Honour's grad. show in 2002 and is a 14x7 grid (the [MARS] show had a 15x6 grid.