Landscope (The Machine in the Garden) 1993-9

oxidised steel, water, microorganisms, algae, larvae

 420 x 420 x 240cm

The first in this series of works is like a cathedral/prison rising out of i a contained artificial swamp.

Seascape 1995

Steel, water, detritus, sex-doll

600 x 600 x 30 cm

This installation consisted of a circular pool of green seawater 6.5 meters in diameter and 80 mm high.
In the water blue-green algae and other marine micro-organisms compete for dominance. A colourful, carefully selected jetsam of coke cans, wrappers, sea scoured foam etc as well as organic detritus, shells, seaweed etc litter the suface leaving the middle of the pool relatively empty except for a drowned human form arms and legs outstretched in an anti-vitruvian posture. Around the outside of the tank is a thin fuzz of worn buffalo grass radiating short tendrils onto the floor.

World Between 1997-9

Steel, water, detritus, MDF, vinyl, tree branches, self adhesive plastic

600 x 600 x 300 cm

Out of a circular shallow pool, deep green in colour and clogged with gum leaves and jewel like specks of plastic rises a vertical square module ,2.5,2.5 m supported on a spindly steel A frame like an advertising billboard or the scoreboard from a deserted suburban sportsground. Within this module compartments of decreasing size and increasing number radiate from a central blank square. A branching tree has been vivisected, then forced into this artificial period doubling structure.

Our focus on the pretty is an Apollonian strategy. The leaves and flowers, the birds, the hills are a patchwork pattern by which we map the known. What the west represses in its view of nature is the chthonian, which means ‘of the earth’-but earth’s bowels not its surface...The Dionysian is no picnic. It is the chthonian realities which Apollo evades, the blind grinding of subterranean force, the long slow suck, the murk, the ooze.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae p5 Penguin 1990