sue kneebone
Something has been disturbed here; like a grave robber, Kneebone has gone fossicking into the deepest recesses of her scant family history. Yet, unlike a story passed down orally, Kneebone’s tale seems to have been bestowed as if by dream, tapped via telegraph wire. This is no ordinary genealogy, this is a perfectly laid out lineage of wonder encrusted relics, yet it is somehow exceptionally convincing.
The installation of this exhibition gives a strange sense of the domestic interior, yet there is such a cross pollination with the exterior landscape that one accepts this as cohesive at first, and then, subsequently is a little confounded. The museum artifacts mingle well aesthetically, yet a pool of pastoral paternalism surrounds these vestiges, and both become as haunting as each other. The scent of extinction pervades the space, yet I question what is real and what is conjured from Kneebone’s new mythology.
The work The past remains is at first glance an old survey map of the area around Yardea, Kneebone’s ancestral home, but the map flows on, wrapping itself around actual bones, inverting the idea of contours via materiality. These are arterial roads inward, where following the words ‘apparently’ on a map seems like a way to get to the ‘Good Country’, or so it appears.
In the photomontages such as, A cautionary tale of overconfidence and The coexistence of comfort and threat, Kneebone has presented what could be taken as a set of old family portraits. These come complete with transmogrified relatives sprouting such seemingly acceptable anomalies as bat’s heads, and include small children who seem to have been birthed from a husk rather than a womb. Continuing across the