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Sue Pedley's installation, Under the Pier, was dominated by a wave-like thrust of plaster surging up under the harbor windows and extending across the width of the gallery space. This shape was suggestive of a swell of water, a sand bank, or perhaps an extension of the land upon which the gallery stands-something huge, demanding and absolutely solid. Pedley's process in constructing this work incorporated exploration and mapping of the geology, history and environment of the site of the gallery and its surrounds-the harbor foreshore, the naval station and the Finger Wharf. The play between the results of these investigations and the materials already intrinsic to Pedley's practice make for an evocative presentation of the inextricable nature of site and place within art practice.
Plaster is Pedley's material. Plaster as material holds connotations of the formality of building and of traditional sculptural practice, but here it is transformed into something else, something organic and amorphous. Something perhaps more closely associated with its genesis as a by-product of gypsum which is itself produced by the historical vagaries of geology and climate. Where marine salt water is washed up or pools inland, and evaporates in an arid climate (such as Australia's) it leaves behind deposits of gypsum, which is used in agriculture, cement manufacture, and of course, in the production of plaster. A property of plaster, once it has been moistened and moulded, and a factor in Pedley's usage of it, is that, under the right conditions of humidity, it will gradually break down, compromising its passive unity. Pedley's interest here gives rise to a sense of a tinkering with temporality and its cycles, and alerts one to a suggestion of chaos