WINDSCREEN, 2020, canvas, acrylic, timber, rope, breeze block, collected grass with accompanying site-specific sound recording, 2.4 x 2.1 x 5.3 m

Maitland Regional Art Gallery
Maitland, New South Wales   

*Runner-Up
Brenda Clouten Memorial Travelling Scholarship  

‘Windscreen’ investigates the changing stages of perception between what can be seen as the ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ within the Australian urban/suburban context. The artwork draws parallels between the untouchable unreality of suburban motorist relationships to ‘nature’ and the viewers' distant yet submersive audiovisual experience of nature as a cinematic spectacle.  The painted billboard references the motorist/viewer’s experience of being dwarfed by the expansive “outside.” The collected grass relocates the sampled outside within the non-site of the gallery pointing to nature itself being the original site. The separated picture plane held upon the billboard suspends the safe ideals of the “inside”, suburban life, within the supposed wild and unkept ‘other’ the ‘nature strip’.