Until recently, issues of 'Public Art' lay dormant within a rubric of visions which are generated regularly about Darwin's potential and future. Such visions are prolific across public interest groups, professional and government bodies but, ironically, have not been drawn into any cohesive effort to reshape, to interpret or to plan for the living culture and built environment of the city.
The exhibition, Public Face, organised by 24HR ART, aimed "to explore some existing and potential relationships between, and attitudes to, location (site) and audience, which can occur when artists 'work in public'."1 Alongside recent Community, Environment, Art and Design initiatives, the exhibition constructs a platform whereby art and artists can achieve a civic profile with public support.
After participating in several collective development sessions , three local artists, Jane Graham, Paul Lawler and Judith Miller, developed separate works for the exhibition. These revealed a consistency with and an extension of the individual practice of each artist. Yet, the significant critical edge of this project lay in the process by which the artists applied the own mode of practice to the initial terms of the brief. In principle 'a gallery of communication' was sought, which would offer relevant issues to public understanding and would work with cultural memory in order to establish a residual affinity between the work and its site after dismantling. More practically, the project explored artistic freedoms between public space and artspace. With the artspace acting as a locus documenta the emphasis of the project was on external impact, viability and effect.
From a basis in the "ordinary" and "everyday'', 2 Jane Graham's series of Art Objects 1-8 was a Camera Lucida selection of 'photographs' with descriptions