A collaboration by Linda Carroli + Felix Ratcliff
Collaborative projects are difficult enough to realise without the additional obstacles of distance and a lack of direct contact between participants. When these obstacles are involved, trust and delegation-elements that are so often short-changed in the process of achieving an end-come to the fore. Fealty is part of an ongoing collaborative project between Brisbane artist Linda Carroli and Hobart-based Felix Ratcliff and was shown at Dunce Gallery, Hobart in January, 1997. Its predecessor sothelegendgoes, installed at the street level Microspace in Brisbane, brought together and exposed the two private worlds of these compulsive collectors in a layered and dense display of invented and selected cultural artefacts. The artists worked on the project through lax, phone and via the post, a decidedly retro-chic position considering their only meeting had been at an Australian Network for Art and Technology Summer School.
Fealty develops the artists shared fascination with 'displaced cultural histories' and is heavily reliant on mutual trust: Carroli worked with the Microspace exhibition, with Ratcliff taxing to her each day, pages of a 1962 diary that chronicled a journey in Tasmania. The dates coincided with the duration of the project, but were decades apart. Unidentified remembrances and personal recollections from a temporal and spatial distance were compressed in to a tiny window box in a busy public street, prompting the question: how private is private? Clues to personal histories, pieces of narratives and fictions were placed in such a way that viewers were permitted to see so far, but no further. Could thelegend be deciphered, or would it remain hermetic, like the glass box itself?
In contrast to Microspace, Dunce Gallery is a converted storage space off a laneway, certainly