i have always been dependent (2012)


As the sun set on the 15th of June, 2012, i performed a new solo piece i have always been dependent to an audience, the culmination of a creative development in track 12 of Carriageworks. With no technological assistance in sound or sight, the diffused light gradually faded until all that remained was a figure in space, distinct but shadowed, ringing through the verses of Memory from Cats. In the hours prior to that showing, I sat in the centre of a spiral of logs in a room full of haze and wrote what the piece had solidified into – a suspension in time, a bleached concentrate, age and time, rebirth, health, destination, locus, artifice/construction, liquids, marination.



Being the last work that I would show in Sydney for a year, it somehow became a point of focus for a lot of ideas that I had been exploring in earlier work, and it was interesting to find myself redrawing on vocabulary, with citrus as health, obfuscation of form, similar improvisation structures, physical language, all coming into play.



Vienna, a city where gravity has the strongest grip, is a civic Baroque reconstruction, and the Hapsburg fascination with the macabre aligned with the process of ancient Egyptian death rituals was redrawn through modern gaze, looking at comfort and ease. Felled logs defined the outer square, a progression which grew in how gnarled they were until they became assemblages of branches, and then an inner square of weathered planks, angled on nails, with a point off centre a richly coloured cross section of log. The concentric spaces were slowly spiralled into.