The oasis created by Eden Gardens offers an escape from its bustling major highway location presenting an ideal situation for this site-specific environmental installation. The enclosed position of this installation within the garden’s layout offers a natural boundary and a sense of containment.
These timber structures are suggestive of habitable temporary shelters, offering a space for reflection, day dreaming, escaping from the intensities of urban living. The copper insect mesh creates a Faraday’s cage, a protection barrier blocking electromagnetic/radio waves thus creating an Internet free space. But these transparent walls and arrangement of the shelters evoke notions of vulnerability and insecurity.
This work continues Kidall’s research into exploring displacement narratives and nomadism while reflecting on the increasing pressures of Sydney’s urban consolidation, the property market and questions the value of ‘home’. See below.
Through site-specific environmental installations Sally Kidall seeks to challenge the predictability of expectations & ‘cultural homogeneity’. Her art practice is inspired by the complexities, equilibrium and fragility of the natural environment and by the ways in which our man-made systems work within, or in opposition to, these natural systems. The focus is the concept of transition, including notions of unpredictability, vulnerability and ephemerality. Issues relating to ecology, cultural displacement, consumption and materialism inform it.
Eden Unearthed 