Photo: Sotha Bourn. © Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
Photo: Sotha Bourn. © Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
Photo: Sotha Bourn. © Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
Photo: Sotha Bourn. © Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
Photo: Sotha Bourn. © Powerhouse Museum, Sydney
Transcript
Ingrid immediately got it – she understood my quest for designs for openwork structures. This is a genre that is not usually collected together, broadly encompassing textiles, glass, steel, wire and paper. Morley's sophisticated work in metal might not immediately be seen as lace, but she read the brief and understood exactly what I was after. Lacie Lorrie has a powerful sense of where it came from and its relationship with Morley is written into its rusting body. The network of holes represents the roads this old logging truck took in its working life in New South Wales. When the proposal initially came through, the truck was photographed in a paddock, lovingly admired by cows and donkeys. Its rusting bumper bar looked like a trembling lower lip which gave it a very human appeal.
Lacie Lorrie
Ingrid Morley
Dimensions
2000 x 2200 x 5720
Materials
Abandoned truck, hand cut with a plasma cutter using a personally adapted tool with a fine cutting head
Artist statement
‘Lorrie and I met on my birthday. She was in a paddock, “put out to grass”, her red rust bleeding into the ground. To me, she belonged to the Australian landscape, with her time-pocked body and work-etched honesty. I too yearned to be absorbed into the landscape and to have the dignity with which she represented her age.
She worked in the timber industry in Oberon, New South Wales, during the 1950s and 60s. Plantation forests have tracks around stands of trees, cut into the landscape, as if tracing “the tracks of my tears” on a weathered face. I reflected on those tears in making the lacework. Cutting the steel revealed negative spaces — a destructive process. Positive forms remained as “products” of this process.
Timber harvesting is tough, leaving its mark on the people and the land, an ambiguous relationship seeming to ask: “How and what do we destroy, in order to produce?”’