"Curiouser and curiouser!" cried Alice: Absurdity in an age of disaster

​Grey Street Gallery QCA Griffith University

An installation of found, constructed, and ready-made sculptures: welded and cast steel, wire, thread, string, fabric, plaster, wax, sand, clay, paint, wood shavings, cushion filling.

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The generally serious nature of contemporary art discourses on "the age of humans" is this work's provocation. Seeking respite from disaster narratives, information overload and moral imperatives, it asks if moments of levity can aid in processing our time's emotional buffeting. Through absurdity and playfulness Curiouser glances ruefully towards the culture wars around climate, and the sheer impossibility of individually giving Capitalism the slip. The massive fault lines running between one individual's reluctant complicity, and free-wheeling ecological breakdown is acknowledged. An assembly of speculative sculptural vignettes swerve away from the informational, offering moments of impossibility or "magic realism" as devices of affective release, in which studio processes and materiality are clearly on view.​​