An interview with Russell Milledge
Linkage Leakage was an ambitious project of cultural exchange, which brought together, in Cairns, seven artists from diverse regions and cultural backgrounds in Nothern Australia, Asia and the Pacific. The artists worked alongside each other, producing new work for a joint exhibition which was shown at the Tanks Art Centre, Cairns and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane. Russell Milledge curator of Linkage Leakage discusses the project and resulting exhibition with Ingrid Hoffmann.
lngrid Hoffmann: In early December 1996 Linkage Leakage opened at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) in Brisbane. Did you see the exhibition there as being a separate entity, or was it more a continuum of the project here in Cairns at the Tanks Art Centre?
Russell Milledge: lt was a continuation of the project but definitely another incarnation of the exhibition. The venue at the Tanks could not be more different from the IMA, and the absence also of the artists in Brisbane made a difference; almost like a cause that has lost momentum without the artists.
IH: Of course, the artists making the exhibition here in Cairns was central to the project. Just recalling that process, cultural collusion was your distilled curatorial thesis. What are your reflections now, several months on, about that 'collusion'?
RM: lt was a fantastic opportunity for me to work with a group of artists whose artmaking is so individual and distinct. I was quite amazed though, at the similarities in their work processes and use of materials. The artists all tended to work with things easily accessible from either the environment at hand, or with things they had brought with them. Pam Lofts, for instance, had collected... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline