I live and work on the land of the Gadigal and Wangal people of the Eora Nation. For 30 years I have advocated for the value of place through an ongoing site-specific art practice that uses installations to give primacy in artwork to the material presence of the places in which they are located. In my PhD thesis (Art and the Status of Place, 2009) I discuss the view popularized by writer, Miwon Kwon, that the phenomenological model of site-specificity is politically exhausted, suggesting it be rethought both in the context of the increasingly serious climatic consequences of the undervaluing of place in global modernity, and knowing that such site-specific works have the potential to advocate for place by the content they communicate when they give key roles to their physical locations.

In the last decade I extended this practice by jointly founding Articulate project space to support and build spatial art practices, and recently a new generation is taking that over. During that decade I also extended the idea of ‘the site’ back into the art practices of earlier generations, when some artists directed art practices away from art conventions of spatial autonomy for reasons peculiar to their own time, focusing especially on the work of Katarzyna Kobro and Sophie Taeuber made around a century ago. I saw their work first hand in a 2013 visit to Museum Szuki (MS2) in Lodz, Poland, where most of Kobro’s surviving work is kept, and in a 2019 visit to collections of Taeuber’s work in France and Germany while on a Fellowship at the Stiftung Arp, Berlin.

I remake their works now to experiment with how they could be constructed to respond to the different social and political context 100 years after first being made, and how that might also help our understanding of time. Borrowing from later artists such as Richard Artschwager is part of the same broad project but his blps ask to be used in a different way, for their text-like discursive quality that seems to both contradict and underscore the overlooked presence of place.

COMING: I am grateful for a 3 month residency in the Woodford Academy starting in February 2025. I would like to remake the outer shell of the colonial building life size in cardboard, or travel back  to the 1830s and rethink the colonial decisions made then to build and settle there. That may be too ambitious for 3 months, but I could make some moves in those directions. I tried that in Can’t think of what to call it yet in Braemer Gallery in Springwood in 2018 that you can see more of here.

This website contains documentation of my three decades of spatial drawing, site-specific installations and related projects that exhibit artworks’ locations as part of their contents. Find links in the archive