By Spike F.
Looking at a butterfly stuck to the end of one of Cllawde’s arrows, I’m reminded of a quote from the 2000 documentary, Beijing Swings. In it, the artist Sun Yuan reflects, “One of my greatest experiences was when I learned that the human body cannot represent a human being’s feelings. Inside the morgue, there is not a living soul in sight.” Her studio is similarly filled with things that once had a life of their own, now repurposed as part of someone else’s narrative.
There’s a photo of a pile of clothes on the floor. To some, the photo may seem unremarkable, but to the person who knows its history—who wore the clothes and knows where they’ve been—the photo carries a symbolic weight, “sentience even,”
says Cllawde. “That’s why I like taking photos backstage at gigs or before things are set up,” she explains. “It’s about the moments surrounding the stated purpose of why everyone’s there. Until we’re on stage or in a photo, we’re just a pile of
clothes on the floor.”
The works in this exhibition resist comprehension and interpretation—or otherwise defy it entirely. They’re stories without a storyteller—or stories told by those who can’t. Imagine the caption beside each simply reads: “you had to be there.” Music, for Cllawde, has become both a metaphor and a tool. “Collecting, capturing, and seeking to preserve things is an all-too-human pursuit,” she tells me. Maybe it’s an attempt to assert control over the uncontrollable. To defy the corrosive effects of time. Attempting to express something fully so others will understand is perhaps even more challenging. Yet we still feel compelled to try.
This fragility resonates in Joseph’s work, where transformation is equally important. A sculpture of two squirrels, inspired by an ornament found in Allora, Queensland, has been recreated through a process of fabrication and reinvention.
The butterflies on Cllawde’s arrows and Joseph’s squirrel share this tension. Both creatures were once alive, their existence fleeting yet each with a purpose of their own, now exist as objects of art—mute in an art gallery—with only traces of their former vitality.
And what was left behind in this transformation? What was left on the footpath, discarded and deemed irrelevant?
The materials used by Joseph in his works include sediment scavenged from the University of Melbourne’s old geology building skip, gifted astroturf, borrowed wood, paint, and found items. The squirrels are patched together like debris and fur swept together by the wind.
“These works engage forms in a Frankenstein sort-of way. And as such, the results also come out imperfectly, dissembled parts pretending to be something they’re not.” Cllawde’s work features wood carvings, frottage, and arrows–recreations of objects that contain deliberate imperfections, or perhaps reflect an inability to avoid them. Traditionally, art was about
depicting nature and the likeness of a subject. “Here, we could say, it reconstructs and reimagines nature,” I suggest. Cllawde agrees.
Ultimately, the show questions intention, the meanings behind things, and the role of appearances—whether consciously or unconsciously cultivated. It deals with authenticity, but also its fetishisation. About romanticising and sentimentalising the mundane—things or moments or aspects of relationships that would otherwise go unnoticed or dismissed as useless or irrelevant—as unglamorous and unromantic. It’s about absence—what’s been lost in translation or not immediately present to the viewer. The dead things in the show make this point crystal clear. Identity is like that—here today, gone tomorrow.
“And listen to the sounds of the day as if they were chords of eternity.”