Untitled Constructions/After Image. 1994

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Untitled Constructions/After Image. 1994
The images are of full scale works and marquettes made during the development of a work to be installed in the atrium of the building for the opening of the Casula Powerhouse. 1994.

The images are of full scale works and marquettes made during the development of a work to be installed in the atrium of the building prior to the opening of the Casula Powerhouse. 1994.

The work was to be constructed/woven from fine pure cotton as a three dimensional gridded form that would float above the atrium. 3 by 2 by 2 metres.This constructioin follows a general tendency in my work to be site specific.

The Casula Powerhouse started its modern life as a coal burning electricity generation plant. Obsolete before it was completed, its placement right on the banks of the Georges River near Liverpool NSW, west of Sydney, a very long way from coal supplies was breathtaking in its lack of vision.

The liverpool train line was constructed to supply the coal for the generator which in turn was supplying the growing Liverpools electricity supply. The growth of the area outstripped the supply potential. The power plant was decommissioned and partly scrapped and was a great site for some general 'vandalism', before its 'Lazerus like resurrection' as an Arts Complex.

Encountering the building for me is like encountering all over again a number of modernist idealisms, for example form and function is implicit in its post Gropius utilitarian architecture.

It is also possible to encounter the facade and its 'other side' simultaneously. or the almost evangelical religious fervour that underpins 'progressive' modernism, that which it seeks to deny religion and 'nature'.

I think it was an aphorism of Theo Doesenberg that said "The square shall replace the cross."

The Work untitled construction/after image floats in the air above you. It is constructed to leave an out of focus visual afterimage, a 'ghost' cross embedded, implicit in the form