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Palmer Sculpture Biennal 2024
The Palmer Sculpture Biennial, which has been running since 2004, was conceived to allow the wider art community to experience sculpture in a dramatic “beyond the walls” setting, and also assess for itself the idea that in a digitised world, site-specific art objects have agency.
This year marks the 11th Palmer Sculpture Biennial. Nineteen artists from interstate, overseas and within South Australia are represented. |
In Palmer’s unforgiving landscape, art works must fight to survive. Art will always dance to nature’s tune in this place. Scale plays tricks on the eyes. On hot days, solid forms dissolve into shimmering chimera. Shadows shrink to knife slits or run from the setting sun like skid marks on hard top. Painstakingly conceived sculptures can be reduced to dashes and dots on an epic canvas defined by a land mass meeting the sky.
Review by John Neylon
https://inreview.com.au/inreview/visual-art/2024/03/21/art-dances-to-natures-tune-at-the-palmer-sculpture-biennial/
Review by John Neylon
https://inreview.com.au/inreview/visual-art/2024/03/21/art-dances-to-natures-tune-at-the-palmer-sculpture-biennial/
Art dances to nature’s tune at the Palmer Sculpture Biennial...
Review by John Neylon
In response, most artists have adopted ways to insinuate their work and ideas into not one big, amorphous landscape but multiple landscapes – ridges, soaks, escarpments, tumble-downs, slopes and gullies. Insinuation involves subtle gestures of relationship that are tantamount to asking permission to enter country. To show respect.
There are many examples. Liz Butler’s On Reflection is basically a modified discarded rainwater tank, lying on its side with one end stoved in. The artist was thinking of the importance of water in early settlement – thus the choice of the tank. By inserting a mirrored base, partially seen through the corroded base, the viewer is rewarded with a reflection of self and landscape and, in the mind of the artist, “an invitation to consider responsibility in protecting the the natural environment”.
https://inreview.com.au/inreview/visual-art/2024/03/21/art-dances-to-natures-tune-at-the-palmer-sculpture-biennial/
On Reflection, by Liz Butler. Photo: John Neylon