Ricky SWALLOW, Clockman 1998
from National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Home Sweet Home Hosted by National Gallery of Australia
PF: I’d gone into Darren Knight Gallery, and this tiny piece high up on the wall, just so tiny and vulnerable, and yet I actually didn’t know the reference. It’s a reference to a Charles Ray performance piece, and I just thought it was just a fun, fun piece, and I really was quite amazed when Darren said ‘Oh, that’s one of Ricky Swallow’s little pieces’. I knew I had to have it, even though I didn’t know who had done it. That didn’t worry me. This, to me, was just the artist at play. This was a very playful… almost like a warm-up piece. This had a real ‘limber up’ feeling to me, and yet, if you look at it very closely the figure is there, the feet are there, and even though it’s quite tiny, ten or so centimetres, you can see the man in the clock; he’s trapped in there. So it is, I think, a great testimony to the artist’s skill, to be able to be so playful, and yet at the same time there’s the sense of the imprisoned character behind this sort of ‘clock face’. It’s a lovely, little moment that has a very big metaphysical dynamic to it.
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