from Look and Listen 2025, partial documentation of WAYOUT_blp 2023, first shown in 2minus1 at 80:20 artist agency run by William Seeto at 377 Parramatta Road Leichhardt 2040. Open 12-4pm Sat - Sun, 6-21 September 2025, opening : 2-5pm Sat 6/9. Photos: William Seeto https://www.instagram.com/80_20artistagency/

Roomsheet:

Two years ago, 140 people each lent an object they normally live with to the WAYOUT_blp project.  I lay the objects along the floorboards of Cementa’s WAYOUT building in Kandos to make the floor drawing WAYOUT_blp. I thought of these objects as surrogates for the places they are from, and for the people who lent them, making their gathering in Kandos seem like a rallying together of places and their carers. 

WAYOUT_blp is now dispersed. The objects are back where they came from, the WAYOUT building is continuing its exhibition program, and I am documenting WAYOUT_blp here with its other remaining components: the names of the people and places that enabled it to happen, a selection of the 140 stories lenders tell of their objects paired with the drawings others made of those objects, the arrangement of the objects to make WAYOUT_blp (shown here in an image behind the credit roll), and the blp shape itself (now marking the here of Wangal/Leichhardt). These components are not presented to try to bring the project back to life, but as the remnants of a blp-event that could be tailored to other places and times. I hope to show the other paired stories and drawings elsewhere within WAYOUT_blp’s catchment area, along with the credits and the blp shape.

The stories were collected initially to record connections between objects and place (in contrast to the appeal that found objects have in many art practices because their past is lost). The drawings were made by people responding to an open invitation to draw objects so they could be recorded in a personal way. The care and attention needed to draw from observation was also an attempt to reflect the care and attention to place that motivated me to make the work, and that lenders seemed to show by participating in WAYOUT_blp. Once enough drawings were gathered together, I saw that the surprising diversity of drawing vernaculars reflected the variety of objects lent. And once I saw and heard the drawings and voices simultaneously, as pairs, I could see that the gulf between the two records of the absent object gave it plenty of room to still exist in its own right, wherever it is now.

This documentation exhibition is composed of 3 works:

Look and Listen 2024–2025
Listen to the object’s lender tell how they came to live with it at the same time as you look at a drawing of the object (usually made by someone else).

Each drawing is in a folder with a QR code on the outside: use your phone to link to Google Drive to hear the voice of the lender (or they may be present and can tell you directly.) Find the lender’s name below (alphabetically by surname) to find the name of the drawer of their object.

blps 2025
Artist Richard Artschwager gave a name and meaning to an ancient and now ubiquitous shape by calling it a blp and using it from 1967 onwards as an art signpost to its ‘here’, wherever it is located. I began using his blp to explore the dilemma of the photographic documentation of live, site-specific artwork, in which standard  documentation replaces this type of artwork’s raison d'être—the live place—with a photographic image of the place, as if it’s the same thing. The Anthropocene has made (inhabitable) place super vulnerable, which is a reason some artists make site-specific work and also why the routine disappearance of place into photographic documentation needs some resistance or signalling. I adopted Artschwager’s blp to signal that potential for disappearance, because the blp shape can slide unchanged between place and image, not belonging completely to either.  It doesn’t disappear in the image, unlike the actual space of a place.

WAYOUT_blp Credits
The credit roll is shown on a screen, listing the people who lent an object for WAYOUT_blp and the places where they live, the people who drew the objects, exhibition spaces, photographers, advisers, constructors and funders. The lenders and drawers responded to open callouts to lend an object they value and live with, and/or to draw objects once installed as a blp. See credit roll here