wrong day mayfield 2009

The Macquarie Dictionary defines Aluminium as a silver-white metallic element, light in weight, ductile (that is, capable of being hammered out thin, and able to stand deformation under a load without fracture), malleable (that is, capable of being extended or shaped by hammering or by pressure with rollers) and not readily oxidised or tarnished. It occurs combined in nature in igneous rocks, shales, clays, and most soils. It is widely used in alloys and for lightweight utensils, castings, aeroplane parts, etc.

The aluminium made from alumina (the oxide of aluminium, found mostly as bauxite) at the Tomago plant near Newcastle is produced in various kinds, with varying alloy content to suit different purposes. Aluminium is used extensively in the building industry with aluminium window frames, for example, and in the beverage industry for drink cans. There are billets, ingots and slabs, which vary in size and shape. The slabs which we have used at Customs House – weighing an average of six tonnes each – are used for making alfoil. The combined weight of the eight slabs is 48 tonnes.

Aluminium foil is an expensive looking material. At the supermarket, I bought a 70 metre roll, 30 cm wide, for $10. This is discounted because of the large length – it weighs 670 grams. We have calculated that 48 tonnes of aluminium will make 6000 kilometres of aluminium foil of this width. If 70 metres costs $10 retail, then the retail value of 6000 kilometres should be a bit over 857 thousand dollars. The wholesale value of the eight slabs is more like $125.000.

Aluminium foil looks like perfection, like a promise of protection, like a glittering wrap, all surface, shimmering with attraction, reflecting the material world around itself. When you pull it from its roll, and tear on the convenient serrated metal edge to the cardboard package, the endless roll becomes segmented into domestic scale, into useable slices of metal sheet which the kitchen adores: wrapping and baking apples and fish, covering the roasting pan, sealing freshness inside for the freezer’s delayed gratifications. It is an obsessive package. It is a all consumer lust. Stare into the mirror of the foil, and see consumption not redemption. This dense materiality, this lightness, this disposable brilliance — marker of time, mortality, appetite, desire. Marker of cleanliness, germ-free guarantees, pulled, stretched out, torn off, folded, shaped around things, peeled off from things, re-exposing the protected, then simply crushed. Crush. Disposed, into the bin, and away to landfill.

All of this heaviness, this weight and seriousness of the solid, this bulk and hardiness, this scale and the apparent permanence of the hefty slabs, all of this leads to a metamorphosis to the insubstantial, to disappearance.

There are no words or letters made with the slabs. Perhaps writing is frozen speech, and the sun warming the slabs out there in the plaza in front of old Customs House makes conversation swing into the breeze. The work is all implication. What is this, where is it from, who put it here, how is it made, why? Why this not that? Where to now?

Sculpture is about place as well as space and solid forms. Sculpture is also a relationship with the body of each person experiencing it, as they move through the surrounding dimensions of its occurrence.

This aluminium sits for a moment between states. It was bauxite ore, then alumina, now aluminium alloy, and will soon be aluminium foil. All of its presence is temporary, it is in a state between states. Think of all the alfoil reflecting in the sun. Think how much electricity it took to make this fanciful foil. It is another folly. We are fossil fools.

This is Local Produce, made and ready to ship. Locality is all. There is no there there. It is all here.

[View with PicLens]

I had worked with Michael Chapman (at his invitation) on a project in Newcastle called Back to the City in Newcastle early in 2008. Our contribution involved bringing 48 tonnes of aluminium slabs from the smelter at Kooragang Island to the parade ground in front of Customs House. (Documentation of this project has now been published in a solid hardback book Back to the City: Strategies for Informal Urban Interventions, editor Steffen Lehmann, published by Hatje Cantz.)
For the Adelaide Showground I wanted to use aluminium as a sculptural material, and imagined a new kind of fence picket made by casting.

Michael Chapman worked intensively on the computer modelling of the mould
and the ground plan layouts.

Making the mould took six weeks of work by Sankey Diecasting in Adelaide, and one thousand pickets each weighing three kilograms were cast at the factory.

Installation … process … final result.

Photographs by Adey Brecknock

I installed a 15 metre square word work in the lawns of the George Pentland Botanic Gardens using shapes of a stencil font cut-out in black plastic. The material was thick builders’ plastic, which has no light show-through and would sun-starve the grass. It took a lot of calculation to scale the letter segments up to make a composite piece metres by 15 metres, and more than six hours for two people to cut out the segments.
The plan was that these segments would be secured to the lawn, using weed mat pins (which are shaped like a letter U), and calculated that we needed over 900 of these pins, which weighed over 20 kilograms. I flew to Melbourne with the packs of pins and the cut plastic in suitcases. My son Jasper joined me at Flinders Street train station for the trainride to Frankston. On site was Mark Themann, an artist working as the White Street project co-ordinator. We laid out the grid for the 36 letters using string, over 200 metres of it in a grid which was 15 x 15 metres square. Laying out the design and putting in all of the weed mat pins took the three of us more than six hours, with three of us bending like emus, while the gardens’ birds had an amused look.
Melbourne had been in a long drought and strict water restrictions were in place, but the botanical gardens has its own bores so water was available. Over the next six weeks the gardens staff kept the grass between the letters on a fertiliser diet with constant watering.
Then the plastic and the were all removed, and the grass was mown. Pictures of this process are on the project website: www.whitestreetproject.org/node/42
The high-angle photograph is by Mark Themann, who managed to borrow a cherry picker and bring it to the botanical gardens to get this aerial shot.
Support team: Alan Prowd (studio assistant), Jasper Tipping (landscape gardner), Mark Themann (project co-ordinator for the White Street Project in Frankston)
Funding: Frankston City Council, Victoria

[View with PicLens]

This steel sculpture is 15 metres long, 1.8 metres high and 1.5 metres wide. It sits on the banks of the Brisbane River at New farm.

A boxed set of small open-edition signs by Richard Tipping published by Artpoem Press has been acquired for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
This set titled Sign Here (edition of 7, 2005) has over thirty different multiples, with detailed information on each, held in a wooden box with an engraved lid. Sign Here was accepted into the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books in 2008 as a donation by the collector Mary Meehan Oldenburg.

Six of the edition of 7 Sign Here boxes are now in collections (in order of date of acquisition):
Southern Cross University, New South Wales
The Art Gallery of New South Wales
The State Library of Victoria, Melbourne
The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
The Sackner Archive of Visual Concrete Poetry, Miami
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
The last example is in stock at the Eagle Gallery (director, Emma Hill)
in London

Australia:
The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Art Gallery of Queensland, Brisbane; Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart; Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin; the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Powerhouse Centre for the Live Arts, Brisbane;

Regional art galleries including: Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery, New South Wales; Newcastle Region Art Gallery, Newcastle, NSW;
Lismore Art Gallery, NSW; Gold Coast Art Gallery, Surfers Paradise, Queensland;

State libraries: the National Library of Australia, Canberra; the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney; the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne; the State Library of Queensland, Brisbane;

University library and art collections including the Rare Books Collection, Monash University, Melbourne; the College of Fine Art, University of NSW, Sydney; the Barr Smith Library, University of Adelaide; the Australian Defence Force Academy Library, University of New South Wales, Canberra; the Fryer Library, University of Queensland, Brisbane; Southern Cross University, Lismore, NSW; the University of Newcastle, NSW;

International:
the Sackner Archive of Visual Concrete Poetry, Miami; the Museum of Modern Art, New York (Prints Department); the Deutsches Telekommunication Museum, Frankfurt; the International Concrete Poetry Archive, Oxford, England;

International libraries: the Beinecker Library, Yale University; the Rare Books Collection, Buffalo University Library; the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art Library, New York;