"Cyclones have a sound—the sound of hundreds of sheets of iron flying in the wind." "We could hear iron ripping or tearing off, whether it was our iron or somebody else's we didn't know... " "There is a particular screeching noise made when corrugated iron sheets rub against each other or are pulled off their holding nails... "
comments by survivors of Cyclone Tracy.
100% TRACY, an exhibition commemorating Cyclone Tracy opened in Darwin at 24 HR ART, last December, twenty years after the cyclone. The intention of 100% TRACY was to reflect on the cyclone experience via its generic material—corrugated iron. All of the twelve participating artists work either with recycled materials which invariably includes galvanised corrugated iron (given its ubiquitous place in Australian culture, or with its contemporary form, corrugated custom or mini orbe zinc alume). Six of the artists were from the Northern Territory and they all made new work directly addressing the cyclone, whereas the interstate contingent was invited on the basis of the artists' continuing exploration of the material. Only two, Ted Jonsson and Chris Mulhearn invoked Tracy directly.
Rosalie Gascoigne was the only artist who exhibited a work as old as the memories of Tracy. Gascoigne's Pink Window (1975) reads now as an elegy for the cyclone, a moment in the wind caught and stilled forever. The ambiguity of the gathered and rumpled sheet of iron against the window frame, looks like a torn ruffle-pleated fabric curtain and also like a sheet of iron that has blown against this frame from somewhere else. This work was the inspiration for the exhibition and, in the way that it spoke so eloquently of things it