Sound of Bamboo
Artspace, Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney 2002
Materials: wool fabric and acrylic thread on bamboo. Photo: Greg Weight
Sound of Bamboo 2002 with Boyd, Group exhibition- Hue - Gallery4A, Sydney
Sound of Bamboo 2003 with Boyd, Mai’s Gallery, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Sound by Boyd - http://www.burragorang.org/bamboo.php
Sound of Bamboo 2003 with Boyd, Mai’s Gallery, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Sound by Boyd - http://www.burragorang.org/bamboo.php
Sound of Bamboo
Royal Botanical Gardens & Artspace Sydney 2002
Nature is beautiful when it wears ‘the appearance of art’, while art can only be termed beautiful where we are conscious of its being art, while yet it has the appearance of nature—Immanuel Kant
Sue Pedley is an artist of place. She forges links within and between places, to bring attention not only to the specific and perhaps overlooked qualities of the place we might be standing in, but also to the relationship of this place to other places, and hence to other histories, cultures and power stakes. Her site-specific interventions are subtle and ephemeral, designed to evince reflective responses, poetic musings, a gentle form of embodied awareness. They often hover on the boundary between art and nature, where we are called upon to think about this relationship and the role of art and the artist in everyday life. Pedley’s installations are born out of long periods of research, when she investigates the history of her chosen site, as well as the materials and type of activity that go to make up that site’s identity, so working through the links between daily experience, place, aesthetics and nature.
Sound of Bamboo and Sound of Lotus comprise three separate pieces of work, one a site specific installation in Sydney’s Royal Botanical Gardens, the others a collaborative sound installation at Gallery 4A and a series of cyanotypes at Mori Gallery. The whole body of work comes out of the powerful experience of Pedley’s recent residency in Sri Lanka, and her extensive travels through Vietnam. While in Sri Lanka, Pedley spent her time working alongside gardeners and landscape architects in the glorious Lunuganga, an estate designed by the architect Geoffrey Bawa in the 1950s in a style that combines European and Eastern aesthetics. Lunuganga is dominated by a huge garden, at times wild, at times mannered, both ornamental and productive. For its designer, the garden provided the perfect opportunity to give expression to his fascination with the interplay of art and nature in the creation of beauty.
For Sound of Bamboo, Pedley has selected as her site a place associated with early European settlement and the collection and domestication of exotic samples of plant-life for display, edification and moral uplift. Against the site’s Occidental roots in art and science, Pedley has chosen a plant that is synonymous with the Orient, and renowned for its rampant growth and hardiness, without the need for careful tending that ‘gardening’ might imply: the bamboo. Using her signature red wool, the artist has spent many days amongst the thick clumps of stalks, painstakingly weaving a counter-narrative through this exotic plant, surrounded by an insistent rustle that cocoons her from the Gardens’ ambient sounds. Through her intervention, Pedley invites us into the bamboo’s inner sanctum, to experience its proximity on its own terms, relying on colour to make her impact. Bawa thought of colour in garden design as secondary, almost intrusive in the larger composition. Yet it is this very intrusiveness that Pedley champions.
Click here to read the rest of this essay
Parts of this text were originally published in Artspace’s catalogue for Pedley’s exhibition, Sound of Bamboo, RBG, 2002.
Sue Pedley is an artist of place. She forges links within and between places, to bring attention not only to the specific and perhaps overlooked qualities of the place we might be standing in, but also to the relationship of this place to other places, and hence to other histories, cultures and power stakes. Her site-specific interventions are subtle and ephemeral, designed to evince reflective responses, poetic musings, a gentle form of embodied awareness. They often hover on the boundary between art and nature, where we are called upon to think about this relationship and the role of art and the artist in everyday life. Pedley’s installations are born out of long periods of research, when she investigates the history of her chosen site, as well as the materials and type of activity that go to make up that site’s identity, so working through the links between daily experience, place, aesthetics and nature.
Sound of Bamboo and Sound of Lotus comprise three separate pieces of work, one a site specific installation in Sydney’s Royal Botanical Gardens, the others a collaborative sound installation at Gallery 4A and a series of cyanotypes at Mori Gallery. The whole body of work comes out of the powerful experience of Pedley’s recent residency in Sri Lanka, and her extensive travels through Vietnam. While in Sri Lanka, Pedley spent her time working alongside gardeners and landscape architects in the glorious Lunuganga, an estate designed by the architect Geoffrey Bawa in the 1950s in a style that combines European and Eastern aesthetics. Lunuganga is dominated by a huge garden, at times wild, at times mannered, both ornamental and productive. For its designer, the garden provided the perfect opportunity to give expression to his fascination with the interplay of art and nature in the creation of beauty.
For Sound of Bamboo, Pedley has selected as her site a place associated with early European settlement and the collection and domestication of exotic samples of plant-life for display, edification and moral uplift. Against the site’s Occidental roots in art and science, Pedley has chosen a plant that is synonymous with the Orient, and renowned for its rampant growth and hardiness, without the need for careful tending that ‘gardening’ might imply: the bamboo. Using her signature red wool, the artist has spent many days amongst the thick clumps of stalks, painstakingly weaving a counter-narrative through this exotic plant, surrounded by an insistent rustle that cocoons her from the Gardens’ ambient sounds. Through her intervention, Pedley invites us into the bamboo’s inner sanctum, to experience its proximity on its own terms, relying on colour to make her impact. Bawa thought of colour in garden design as secondary, almost intrusive in the larger composition. Yet it is this very intrusiveness that Pedley champions.
Click here to read the rest of this essay
Parts of this text were originally published in Artspace’s catalogue for Pedley’s exhibition, Sound of Bamboo, RBG, 2002.