A Roundtable Discussion with Amy-Clare McCarthy, Kieran Swann, Kinly Grey and Meagan Streader
In late 2017, curators Amy-Clare McCarthy and Kieran Swann teamed up to produce two temporary public art projects commissioned by the Brisbane City Council—The Weight of Light by Meagan Streader, held 8–26 September inside Brisbane’s heritage-listed Spring Hill Reservoir; and The Size of Air by Kinly Grey, held 25–27 October in a marquee on the Queen Street Mall. This roundtable discussion with the curators and artists examines the projects and the liberating and challenging nature of public art in general. It was undertaken by email and finished via Skype and in person, in late 2017 and early 2018.
Emily Wakeling: To start, how were the projects conceived, and what were the precedents?
Amy-Clare McCarthy: In the beginning, Kieran and I were thinking about artists whose works were in some way experiential—they could only really be grasped by being there. Kieran and I have experienced both Meagan’s and Kinly’s works before in gallery contexts. Meagan had a work at Metro Arts in 2016 that traced the architecture of the gallery with lines of light, and that work changed the experience of the space so much that this gallery (in which I’d spent the past three years working) suddenly felt unfamiliar to me. We’d both been in one of Kinly’s smoke works before, and found the way the work engulfs you to be incredibly strange but also a very moving experience.
Being public art, we were also thinking about ‘the public’ and we wanted to curate works that people weren’t alienated by. What I love about both these works is that they’re very conceptually rich and grow out of specific lineages within art history, but you don’t need... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Meagan Streader, The Weight of Light, 2017. Photograph Louis Lim.
Kinly Grey, The Size of Air, 2017. Photograph Carl Warner.
