surfacing
When attending recent ANZAC day services, I was taken by the sameness of the rows of 'official' headstones in the local cemetery. At the end of each row was a stone with no name engraved upon it. The stone stood for all the men who could not be named; possibly missing in action, it will never be known how or when they died. The ANZAC commemorations seemed to be an attempt to personify the sheer blankness of the memorial stone, and somehow remind us that these rows of stone represent individual men. Grant Thompson's installation surfacing renders a similar surface to the white shirt. He reminds us that beneath a starched white simplicity there are multiple stories, and decades of individual men wearing white shirts and making selections within what appear to be narrow ranges of style and possibility.
Thompson's exhibition is presented on two adjoining walls of a square white room. One wall holds a nine and a half metre field of tightly packed plaited rounds, and the other, regimented ranks of collars. Thompson has taken a relatively simple material-the working man's white shirt and created a story of change found within repetition. Salvaged from thrift shops, each shirt has carefully been unstitched. Its collar then hung on the wall as an archival record of wear, stains, traces of previous wearers, and labels of manufacture. The remaining shirt has finally been transformed into a round by a methodical process of cutting followed by plaiting and restitching. Thompson writes in the accompanying catalogue, cutting collars the shirt, grasping it just below the band. Scissor blades glide the reinforced seam tearing through fabric and separating collar from shirt. Without its collar