Drift 2017
100+ kiln cast and cold-worked lead crystal pieces, mirror, 110cm diameterIn
Collection of Redland City Council Art Gallery
Drift features a series of small objects collected at various Redlands beaches, cast and reproduced in an opaque white (also known as opaline) glass. In effect, these small sculptures are facsimiles of real objects found during my time wandering the shoreline. Reproduced in the same material, they become homogenised, and look to be of the same origin. However, closer inspection reveals the variety of objects that are now disassociated with their original purpose. Drift acts as a snapshot in time of this place, as if a sample tray or an archaeological find. There is also an allegorical aspect to the work with it being made of glass - which has its origin in sand. The mirror references lenses, the shoreline and water surface with the reflection of light.
Excerpt from Lucy Quinn and the poetics of process, catalogue essay by Penelope Grist
..For Drift, Quinn became a Redlands beachcomber, wandering the shorelines at Cleveland, Wellington Point and Stradbroke Island. On Coonanglebah (Dunk Island) around 1906, E.J. Banfield wrote of ‘gentle art of beachcombing’: ‘When the sea casts up its gifts on these radiant shores, I boldly and with glee give way to my beachcombing instincts … I rejoice and am glad in it. And then what strange and varied things one sees!’[1] Quinn continues proudly in the Banfield tradition, not minding if she occasionally stank out her car.
The objects Quinn collected, she cast and copied in opaque white glass. They include a bundle of rope, turtle bones, plastic bottle caps, mangrove seed pods, McDonald’s packaging, crab claws, timber off cuts, rocks, plastic soy sauce fish, masonry chips, coral, bricks, sea shells, and terracotta. Cast as equals, all these objects demand our close attention. Of the bundle of rope, she notes that a scientist friend pointed out how it was carefully, almost-lovingly bundled – a coil of rope to take pride in, lost. Arranged on a large, round mirror, these objects gain both the majestic setting of a secular reliquary and the unprepossessing setting of specimens laid out for examination under a microscope. Or does she see a thousand years into the future archaeologist’s ‘finds tray’ – an excavated snapshot of our world now.
Quinn avoids the obvious without straying into the esoteric. Her work evokes an awareness of science through symbolic forms we associate with its methods – collection, classification and examination. The mystery of drift-detritus, wondering where it came from, who touched it last, combines with an awareness of the global environmental issue. This awareness is not the works’ ‘message’ but structures is stanzas embracing the now and forever, natural and unnatural, flotsam and jetsam, collision and adaptation, the macro and micro, finite and infinite.
[1] E. J. Banfield The Confessions of a Beachcomber (1906), Sydney University Press, print-on-demand, 2004, page 34.