cellular silence absolute
Anne Ferran
The Ground, The Air
CODEX: Brigita Ozolins Carnegie Gallery, Hobart 6 February – 15 March 2009
Tasmania, the small sometimes forgotten isle, is a place haunted by its historical sites. In contrast to the formative precociousness of places or capitals like Brisbane, where continual construction and reinvention are the norm, this preoccupation with the past seems novel. But in reference to the modern Austrian architect Adolf Loos, when we stubble upon ‘a mound in the forest, six feet long and three feet wide, formed into a pyramid shape by a shovel, we become serious and something within us says, “Someone lies buried here.” This is architecture’.1 This is substance. And for three contemporary exhibitions in Hobart, the unearthed provokes substantive subjective experiences.
Scottish-born artist Susan Grant states, ‘I am from a nation of thrifters, of filers, of conquerors (of rapists), of industrialists, of learners and authors, of philosophers and religious puritans’. In her reverent exhibition ‘cellular silence absolute’, Grant presented a series of suspended pin-prick marks on paper, each backlit with a single exposed hanging light-bulb that illuminated the texts; or if the bulb caught a light breeze, swayed the outline of a tall ship. With titles such as, The Ellipsis: The Journey in Time: The Success Transportation Vessel and The Semi-Colon: The Bridge between: The Penitentiary, Port Arthur, she retraced the subjugated immigration, 145 degrees west to east from Edinburgh to the tiny Port Arthur enclave. She indulged her instincts to order and file, while giving silence a voice.
Through punctuation, or punctuated silence, Grant deciphered a journey that ultimately ends (and in a sense starts) at a graveyard of 1100 mostly unmarked graves. A community defined by architecture and landscape