Foreigner orders Made at the Ipswich Railway Workshops
Louise Denoon
Foreigner orders are made illicitly by tradespeople on work time. Depending on the trade and the imagination of the artisan, a foreigner can embrace a great diversity of forms and uses. The essential and consistent element of these objects is however that they are taken for the personal use of the maker: the pot-stand taken home as a gift for a wife or mother; a money box for a child's birthday; trophies of the rites of passage, the 21st birthday, the wedding, the anniversary, retirement; yabby pumps and fishing rods for weekends away from work; even the very tools upon which the maker's trade relied, planes and routers. From the simplicity of an apple corer or pencil case to the complexity of a seemingly infinitely detailed model of a swimming pool, these objects, made curious by their origins, make up another very successful community oriented exhibition curated by Louise Denoon at the Ipswich Regional Gallery.
In this exhibition, as with her earlier two, a priority has been to make connections with the broader community. The foreigners' exhibition has generated very broad community support and interest and has succeeded in bringing people into the gallery who are not regular gallery goers. Certainly the folklore and notoriety of the foreigners is partly responsible for this.
Foreigners are essentially stolen property, made as they are, in this case, on Queensland Rail time, using workshop equipment and scrap materials. They were typically smuggled out of the Railway Workshops in the bottom of a Gladstone bag, or thrown over the Workshop's tall perimeter fence, or for very large items, taken out on a locomotive's test run and left by the track to be retrieved after