Bonemap takes the emphatically ordinary suitcase as an emblem for the events and relationships of the past. Hundreds of suitcases have been used to create organic structures that turn out to be topographical landmasses, navigated as though on a voyage of discovery through the space of the gallery. Imbued with the odour of many journeys—of departures and arrivals, of age and storage, these suitcases are sentient reminders of our community’s disparate origins.
“As a symbol, the suitcase is double-edged, ambivalent in the extreme: on the one hand, it evokes travel, displacement, emigration, exile and transience; on the other, it is that part of home that travels with us, a reminder of belonging and stability, the world of things we collect around us, the promise of continuity in the midst of change, of order restored. The suitcase is a portable heterotopia, an ‘other space’ that is always there and here at the same time, a home away from home, but also offering the endless possibility of new departures, whether desired or forced.” Elliott and Purdy1
Through juxtaposition with the traditional European ‘cabinet of curiosities’, also known as Wunderkammer, a predecessor of the modern museum and, in addition, reference to Vanitas iconography, the seventeenth century visual arts genre of still life painting incorporating memento mori, the work connects directly with the visual elaboration of the Baroque language of metaphor. This is characterised by the visual elucidation of messages that remain a potent tradition even today—the presence of life in the passage of time as a reminder of mortality. In direct reference to the genre, skulls and clock hands symbolise the inevitability of death, while musical instruments signify the fleeting pleasures of life, broken strings—discord and string instruments without strings—silence. Flowers and insects suggest the ephemeral quality of life in the continuum of time and the empty vessels imply absence.
The mimetic tradition in art is also referenced strongly in the work through the temporal moving image projections of a female body caught in the multiple and uncertain life of mirrors. The rich cognitive effects amplify the ambiguity between form and pattern seemingly contemptuous of the philosophical differences between fine art and decoration. However visual pattern is in itself a significant trigger for memory.
Both the Wunderkammer and the Vanitas genre were popular inventions of the Dutch Baroque and it is at this time in 1606, during the European “voyages of discovery”, that the Dutch East India Company commissioned the Duyfken, captained by Willem Janszoon, to search for “south and east lands” beyond the furthest reaches of their known world. Leaving from Banda (Indonesia), the Duyfken reached the Cape York Peninsula and charted 300km of the coast. This is the first historically recorded voyage to Australia. For the first time, all the inhabited continents of the world were discovered to the European science of geography.
The Exquisite Resonance of Memory is a work about how memories are encountered through provenance and circumstance. The manifestation of collective or cultural memory through reframing the visual representation of the Baroque (to pin-point a time of early European awareness of the Australian continent) reflects on the role memory plays in lending form and consequence to our idea of self.
The work dramatises the way memory functions through association, leaps, or dislocates to become the shadows of ideas and how the more profound of these occurrences can give us a new understanding of our relationship with the world.
Russell Milledge 2008
1. Elliot B. and Purdy A., Man in a Suitcase: Tulse Luper at Compton Verney, Image [&] Narrative, Issue 12: August 2005
