Things to Do With a Women's Weekly.

Things to do with a Women's Weekly
Paper Mosaic
500mm x 700mm
Melbourne 2011

Side view showing pins the that suspend the tiny ripped squares of paper above the base board.

A competition by the Hobart City Council caught my eye. It called for works out of paper or wood. I have never been to Tasmania and thought if I got a work accepted it would be a good excuse to go south.

My starting point a fantastic App called Lego Photo that converts any photo from your collection into a Lego photo, i.e. it breaks it down into simple blocks of colour. I have used this a couple of times to make patterns for cross stitch works.

I then took an Australian Women's Weekly (Christmas addition) and started ripping. Each square is 7mm across and each one of those is suspended on a pin, held in place with a tiny blob of glue. It was not until I quite a way into the project that I actually took time to work out how many squares that I would have to find/sort/rip/pin/glue the components. That number is approximately 2300. Needless to say, it took a looooong time. So long in fact that I managed to miss the deadline for submission into the competition. Darn.

Lunar

Lunar
Oil on Canvas
200mm x 300mm
Melbourne 2011.

This is a small painting achieved with a palette knife.

Lunar Australis

Lunar Australis
Oil On Canvas
1200mm x 800mm
Melbourne 2011.

Lately I have been reading about the Apollo missions of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

There are many iconic photographs of the missions. A shot taken in 1971 on the moon's surface showing the Lunar Lander, Lunar Rover and an astronaut saluting the American flag I found compelling.

The act of planting a flag somehow implies ownership in Western society, an alien takeover - similar to James Cook at Possession Island in Australia, almost precisely 200 years before. It lead me to think what if Australia got there first?