That bodged together iron clad building in the back yard where workbenches, shelving and the family’s forgotten history live. It could be a shed for cows, shearing or boats; the man cave or the she shed. Or it could be the flaked off, discarded, junked, scrapped, the gotten rid of. Shed a tear, shed some light, shed your inhibitions. Once a year, a group of contemporary visual artists get together to produce work in response to a single word, this year’s word is SHED. The words we’ve responded to in the past (since 2009) have been words with a Port-centric theme as the exhibitions have taken place in the Port: RUST | SALT | TAR | SMOKE | KNOT | GRIT | GRAIN | BRIDGE | VESSEL | BILGE | HOLD. Never predictable, often accidental, sometimes unruly and provocative, always pretty wonderful. Curated by Tony Kearney. Click here to see more about previous shows.
THE PACKING SHED
Hart’s Mill, Mundy Street, Port Adelaide
https://adelaidefringe.com.au/fringetix/shed-af2024
For this year’s SHED exhibition, I have made a new video – DEMOLISHED. All the sequences have been composited and animated from images taken in and around the Packing Shed at Hart’s Mill in Port Adelaide / Yartapuulti on the unceded lands of the Kaurna people. Many of the sheds in the area – for boats, for produce, for factories, for storage – have been, or soon will be, demolished to make way for so-called developments, mostly expensive apartment blocks totally out of character with local environment. In the process, both the natural history and the human history of the area are greatly diminished.
None of the images in the video are as they seem in real life. Instead, we imagine what could be if “progress” proceeds at its current rate. What will remain? How will the survivors operate? Where will the ghosts of our history end up?
The soundtrack has been created from a single spoken sample of the word “demolished”.
Here are a few framegrabs from DEMOLISHED.
