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unexpect!

Exhibition

Probe, Herring Island, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Australia

Date

1999

Curated by

Maudy Palmer and Bryony Marks

From the catalogue notes by Bryony Marks:

The 1999 Melbourne Festival’s exhibition Probe combines the work of eight contemporary Australian artists at Herring Island Environmental Sculpture Park. My co-curator, Maudie Palmer and I asked each artist to embark upon an exploration – be it geographic, cultural, spiritual, historical or material – of this island and its surrounds and to intervene with its existing ambience and structural order. In its proximity to the city and serene wilderness, Herring Island reveals a contemporary paradox epitomised by the desire for the recreational and philosophical benefits of a natural environment melded with the ease, comfort and immediacy afforded by our developed urban landscapes. In responses to this quirky environment, the artists have delved into the relationship between states such as permanence and mutation, art and nature, history and the present, art and architecture, organic and synthetic environments, humanity and technology. Eastern and Western cultures, perceptual limitations and frontiers. In probing the hazy middle ground between these fields rather than seeing them as diametrically opposed entities, the complexities and ambiguities of contemporary life are explored. In comparison to the Australia of the first half of the century, as a technologically sophisticated society fuelled by advanced telecommunications we no longer endorse a singular, parochial world view and that it why it is the relationship between ideologies, or preferences, or doctrines, or beings as celebrated by the artists of Probe, which seems most relevant to this site and time.

[…] Michelle Tonkin asks us to transcend the ordinary with unexpect!, a performance-based work situated on Herring Island in a purpose-built dwelling reminiscent of an early Australian colonial hut. Working inside the hut for the duration of the Festival, Tonkin creates works on paper based on the story of the Frog from the Well from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche. The story uses a frog from the confines of a well and a frog from the expanses of the ocean to illustrate the enormous variations in perception gained through different experiences. Acknowledging, like Shepherd, the importance of ritual to perceptual discover, Tonkin envisages her three weeks in the hut as a retreat, where the enforced geographic solitude of the island encourages meditation on her own obstructions and ways she can outreach them. Her drawings document this process of discovery and in an additional attempt to expand perceptual horizons, Tonkin invites prominent members of the community and the visiting public to trek to her hut to make a ‘quintessential expression of [their] greatest skill’. Guests who accept this challenge may astound the audience and artist with demonstrations of skill at intervals throughout Probe. Tonkin engages with the philosophical complexities of the relationship between what we know and what is outside of our tangible experience – that which exceeds our expectations, experiences, sensory, limitations. She says ‘together all who participate in unexpect! Will be like pioneers, exploring unknown emotional, physical and intellectual frontiers’. Whereas the inhabitants of the original pioneers’ hut explored uncharted geographic terrain, as internet-trolling news-weary sophisticates, we now crave a mapping of elusive inner terrain. In her anti-conquering position of passivity, Tonkin accepts our invasion of her retreat, metaphorically inverting our pioneering history.

[…] The unique environment of Herring Island Environmental Sculpture Park provides a refuge from the demands of the city. But as we have seen in Probe, it also provides a forum for contemporary art which questions the relationships between givens or absolutes, these artists provide insight and commentary upon the complexities of our environment.

I live and work on the unceded lands of the peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation and pay my respects to their elders, past present and emerging. 

© 2022 Michelle Tonkin.

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