Public Works Art on-site
Snell Grove Oak Park 2011
The Permeable Barrier series - Artist Tim Cracker at Snell Grove shopping centre, Oak Park, May - July.
Tim Craker’s new suite of works of art, the Permeable Barrier series, was installed in and around the Snell Grove shopping strip in Oak Park throughout May, as part of Moreland City Council’s public art project, Public Works Art-On-Site. Designed to be seen with and installed alongside the council roadworks and other improvements to the area’s amenity, the Permeable Barrier series was created from an everyday, usually unnoticed, humdrum material – orange plastic safety-fencing.
Following Tim Craker’s use of this material in his Botanical Data File series (2008), exhibited in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Melbourne, the Permeable Barrier series explored both the material itself and its possibilities for display, in an extensive outdoor intervention in public space.
Delineating images within the plastic webbing, not by adding material or detail but by subtracting from the grid through judicious excision, Tim Craker revealed images – the silhouettes of objects, birds and botanical specimens - within the man-made plastic.
The images included the leaves of trees native to or growing in (and collected from) the local area – eucalypt and wattle, and the purple coral pea. Oak leaves were also shown, with reference both to the suburb’s name, and to the presence of various “exotic” species from elsewhere in the world. Birds indigenous to the locality – the crow and the wedge-tailed eagle – were represented, both being of significance for the original inhabitants of the area now known as Oak Park. A teapot and teacup also appeared, as emblems of European colonisation, as symbols of domesticity and with reference to the social aspect of a local shopping centre as a meeting place. (In a nice conjunction, the leaves of the indigenous purple coral pea can be used to make tea.)
In a confounding of its normal use, the orange plastic safety-fencing of the Permeable Barrier series was displayed in both “expected” sites and in more unusual situations. If the installations made the casual viewer look twice, and think again, then the artist’s aim has been achieved!
Tim Craker, 2011.
Reviews of Tim Cracker's work
“In later works, Craker moves towards more overt patterning and the grid. Large-scale hanging installations made of plastic safety fencing, Botanical Data File Series #1-3, 2008, comment on our apprehension of the natural world. The high-key orange material provides the schema and Craker has snipped out sections to create a singular leaf motif in each piece. These half-tone botanical specimens are at once single instances and easily recognisable, generic figures. Craker encodes the emblematic qualities of leaf and shadow to comment on the ways we make meaning of the world and what is elided in that process. The plastic off-cuts lie beneath the suspended grid; leaf litter, cells, genetic codes, deleted information; they mark the process of making.”
Martina Copley, independent arts curator and writer, 2010.
"Craker draws out of the banality, even abjectness, of his materials an unexpected quality – grace."- Dr Caroline Jordan, Lecturer in Art History, Latrobe University, 2008
“…the everyday transformed into something magical and enigmatic…”- Gina Fairley, Asian Art News Nov/Dec 2008.
Tim Craker is a Melbourne painter, sculptor and installation-artist. Graduating with an Honours Degree in Fine Art from RMIT in 1993, he has a long history of solo and group shows in Melbourne and overseas – most recently (in May 2010) Ten-Part Net Trap at Jackman Gallery in St Kilda, by whom he is represented. Other solo exhibitions include Out of Print at Nellie Castan Gallery in 2004, and Transcript at Monash University’s Gippsland campus Switchback Gallery in 2005.
Further examples of his work can be seen at Tim Cracker.
Public Works Art On-Site in Fawkner 2010
Two projects, Man-Hole and Head Space, appeared on Major Road, Fawkner, between 20 June and 16 July 2010 this year.
Headspace featured Artist Emma Anna installing and activating a collection of customised wheelbarrows and roadside safety signs at a variety of locations surrounding the Major Road site.
The family of five wheelbarrows appeared in a series of stylised formations - together in one spot on a certain day then reappearing elsewhere and in different formations the next.
Over the course of their residency, these objects where revealed as not-so-silent observers of the development, expressing a humorous dialogue that formed a commentary on the daily activity of the worksite.
The Matt Wilson designed Man-Hole found a road workers tent placed above an imaginary manhole. From within the tent music, sound-scapes and scenes that where inspired not only by the surrounding environment but also the world we don’t see, far below the ground. From a comical situation between 2 workers down the hole to sweeping sound-scapes reminiscent of a backing to a Jules Verne adventure.
The collection of works reflected the strange poetry of the everyday, providing a broader commentary about the power of collective imagining and the importance of humour in the midst of challenges and change.
