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High on a hilltop south of Lyon, France, is Saint-Flour, a medieval village with cathedral, fountains and lace curtains. This was the site for the ninth Chemin d'Art, ('Art Route'), a project that involved seven international artists making work for civic buildings and natural sites around the town. The Australian representative was Nicole Voevodin-Cash, whose work conflates public and private spaces, often forcing the viewer into uncomfortable interaction with fellow viewers or with bodily detritus that might be better swept under the bathroom rug. A focus on the uneasy nature of these relationships in Voevodin-Cash's work has lent itself well to public projects in the past. For example, in 'Retail Therapy' (Brisbane, 2001) the artist encased ragged toenails, fingernails and human hair in plastic clip-top bags and used them to form into lace-like patterns in shop windows.
For Chemin d'Art, Voevodin-Cash again explored lace patterning, but focused much more specifically on site. She was given the windows of a sports centre, tourism office, bank and casino. Responding to the old-fashioned lace curtains that adorned the windows around town, the artist created lace-look compositions using differently sized clip-top bagsfilled with objects drawn from the local environment. In some instances, the objects also engaged with the particular business activity inside the buildings. For example, toy Euro notes and coins were formed into patterns for the bank building. Other sites displayed 'typically' French items including sugared almonds and toothpicks reflecting the French love of eating, and fruit and leaves from the local farmland relating to the toil of farmers. These were hung in concentric circles so as to appear, from a distance, like lace.
There was an atypical conservatism and quietude to this