Fold
No longer a documenter of the eternal silence in the vast spaces between Townsville and Julia Creek, Anne Lord has come to the continent's edge. Having always eschewed the mawkish treatments so temptingly available with outback subject matter, Lord now steady's her gaze on civilisation or perhaps the lack of it, in the feral cracks and hollows found between the boulders of Townsville's cyclonic battlements to the ocean, The Strand.
Fixing herself into the narrowest, most vulnerable and iconic of landscapes and one common to so many of Australia's coast-clinging towns and cities, Lord examines the banal secrets of the crevasses. Amid take-away detritus, she draws her audience into a time-frame which she reprograms to fast forward. This is achieved in a floor installation where photographs of her site are sealed into glass bricks containing mordant baths and allowed to rapidly degenerate. These 'parcels' of time, trap, accelerate and amplify a process usually too slow to trigger human flight or fight responses.
Appropriately, repelling notions of tourist strip cheer but, to this writer's disappointment, denying her audience the option of seeing light through the glass bricks (one side faces the floor) , Lord presents her assorted secrets of the site in portable sized purgatories or, perhaps, snow domes for a sick cityscape, replete with tropical humidity.
This installed regeneration of The Strand experience is drawn large at each end of the gallery wall with paper emblems of disintegrating littered objects. Three dimensional moulded paper squares arranged four by four, moth the shape of foam on the beach. From a distance however they become a gridded ill ustration of a point where the image, of a coke bottle in one instance