Michael Riddle

Gathering and growing food in the western world seems largely a thing of the past, supermarket shelves allow us to conveniently detach from the nasty business of killing animals or putting spade in soil. I found it ironic that in aboriginal communities fresh food was prohibitably expensive considering a proud history of more than forty thousand years of respectful hunting and gathering.

Cages and traps is a wry look at consumerism starting with the idea that a shopping basket can be taken out of the sanitised confines of the supermarket and repurposed in the sea, perhaps to trap a crab or crayfish.

Condominiums rise from a basket while a hamster wheel spins in the landscape of a drive through Eden. The basket of rusty goods was more a comment on my own bachelor hood at the time.

The two meat studies were a chance for me to ponder the strange dichotomy where some animals are revered, protected and loved while others are merely dinner.

In “Tools for living” I imagine prized metaphysical objects (power objects) that have special ritual significance like a suburban version of shields and spears once used in tribal warfare.

Within the human condition we experience emotions both positive and negative, to me the most pervasive and the one I’m most interested in is a sub-group consisting of guilt, regret and loss. I found myself listening to the album Blood on the tracks by Bob Dylan when I made this series.

My own biographical experiences demonstrate that these feelings can become lodged like some immovable matted partial blockage in a plughole of awareness.

The larger works are fashioned from my own masculine perspective; I imagine a garden shed with implements that can be used to settle an emotion in the same way that a lawn mower is used to trim an unruly patch of grass. 

A long handled tool for separation stained with the emotional fluids and scars of a tumultuous relationship can be applied at a distance. A flawed axe can be used to sever a recurring cord of regret or a hollow rake can be used to sweep mental images and memory into a pile.

Entropy resides within closed systems.  All matter is recycled in an endless cycle of birth life and death. Buddhist philosophy hypothesises that all things are re-born in an endless cycle, which is regulated by how we behave in ones present incarnation. Computer systems rely on the ability to retrieve feedback in order to self regulate.  Without feedback, systems can become unstable and collapse. This also applies to the social matrix of interaction.

The works were made, by first gathering a selection of small sapling trees, I dug around the roots and tried to remove them from the soil without damage. After removing the leaves I manipulated the trunks and connected every available root tendril to the tips of each branch.

The tips were bound to the tendrils with cotton and the transition smoothed out with wax, I then invested the trees with a refractory ceramic shell and burnt out the wood. The closed systems were poured in silicone bronze and finished by polishing, sterling silver plating and ultramarine blue flock.

Mike and Genine are a pair of artists who live and work together and whose art practices are respective spaces of refuge.  Currently, the intersections between their ways of thinking and working are more easily observed in the formal and affective dialogues between their creative works than they are consciously known between them as individuals.   This exhibition holds the potential to inject new feedback between two separate systems.

Working in sculpture and installation, Michael Riddle allows chance and accident to have a place in examining how slippages, interruptions and changes of state can act as a site for exploration as the work develops. Using ideas around entropy, function and emotion as drivers and metaphorical vehicles, he sees the objects that he produces as identifying markers purposefully deposited along an often confusing path between his physical self and a complex and sometimes oscillating world of emotions. Michael is beginning his MFA at QUT and is currently represented in Queensland by Jan Manton Art.

Genine Larin works predominantly in sculpture and video.  In her practice she navigates phenomenological feelings, sensations and emotions via speculative compositions that combine pattern and viscerality.  Within the space of practice she examines ideas and expresses feelings without being censored or oppressed by external, patriarchal ideologies. She considers aesthetic choices, based on gut feelings of attraction and repulsion, as having ethical implications.  As a result, there is a strong feminist temperament to her work and working methods, which are especially informed by Kristeva’s psychoanalytic feminism.  Genine is a Masters Candidate at Queensland University of Technology.

Seems like every time you stop and turn around

Something else just hit the ground…

Broken bodies broken bones

Broken voices on broken phones

Take a deep breath feel like you're chokin'

Everything is broken.

Like this lamentation by Bob Dylan, everything in the work of Mike Riddle is broken. Black panels bear deep cracks in their surface. Lattice forms that we imagine once stood proud and strong, are crumpled, some under the weight of rocks, others by circumstances unknown. The titles of the works bear suggestive words such as catastrophic, collapse, control, and failure. The materials the artist uses are pulled from the industrial world, among them pewter, steel, acrylic resin, fiberglass, and concrete. Commonplace things, yet here alchemised to create bitumen-like surfaces and stoic metal structures. These materials are made to stand the test of time—they speak of willful permanence—yet each artwork is frozen in some state of undoing.

In the works Control 2014, I am not best pleased 2014, and That’s how the light gets in 2014, carefully prepared perfect black, bitumen-like surfaces have had pressure forced on them by mechanical means, creating ruptures in their very fabric. For the artist the foundation for this action comes from a deeply personal place. With That’s how the light gets in 2014, Riddle charted the topography of the intersection where the fatal car accident that took his father’s life occurred. From this, he created a metal mechanism based on this landscape that when placed under the smooth bitumen-like surface and mechanically jacked-up, ruptured the surface[i]—the invisible pain of the memory now made visible by a permanent scar.

The lattice structures found in Complete collapse, Catastrophic failure, and Iconoclast are modeled on the architecture of electrical transmission towers. These obelisk shaped forms can be regarded as a symbol of industrial achievement and a marker of the advancing of civilisation as it is these towers that carry the electricity that is necessary for all of the virtues of modern life. These towers are made to be self-supporting and capable of resisting all forces, but here they are afflicted—bent out of shape, burdened, deflated, and collapsed. Once again, the artist orchestrated this destruction during the making process. Heat generated by an electrical fan heater was applied to the original wax models of the towers, melting them into various states of collapse, these forms were then cast in pewter[ii].

There is a distance between the artist and each works ‘demise’. Their destruction is never an act of impulse or feverish emotion. Riddle never enters into the slippery territory of nihilism. His actions are calculated and considered, always executed by some external force and never directly by his own hand. Well aware that there will be consequences to his actions, even though he tries to control the damage through knowledge, practice, experimentation, and choice, the penultimate outcome is still left to chance.

Why do you hate me so much 2014 pushes past destruction into the realm of repair. Here we see the delicate porcelain surface shattered through the making process, and then painstakingly repaired with small sterling silver staples. It seems in this case the will to allow things to pass has been overridden by the will to repair the damage.

Parnell’s dream 2014 looks like a historical tool that has been uncovered from some lost age, however the bitumen and metal of its construction are distinctly of this time. This piece harks to an earlier series of work by the artist titled Tools for living—all these works took a tool like form but were impractical for actual use. Parnell’s dream looks as if it should be held and perhaps used as some sort of shovel, but the holes in the gridded basket at one end deny its use as a container, and the sharp, gravelly surface of the handle is not comfortable for the hand. Perhaps Parnell’s dream is not a tool in the utilitarian sense, but a tool for the soul. In his view of modernism, Marshall Berman puts forward:

To be modern…is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one's world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. To be a modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom, to make its rhythms one’s own, to move within its currents in search of the forms of reality, of beauty, of freedom, of justice, that its fervid and perilous flow allows.[iii]

Like Berman, Mike Riddle’s work and arguably his self is located in this perpetual maelstrom. We are shaped by so many outside influences, things that afflict us physically and mentally that, over time, create a butterfly effect of consequence amongst which our connection to self can become murky. Even with the best-laid plans all things come to an inevitable demise. But if this is the case, destruction can be of our own choosing. Let us wipe it all away and if not by our own hand, let it be within our control, let us choose the influences and path of demise and let us rest with hope that something all together more wonderful, interesting, and good, is created.

Megan Williams

October 2014

[i] Conversation with the artist, 23 September 2014.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Marshall Berman, All that is solid melts into air: the experience of Modernity (London/New York: Verso, 2009), 345–346.

Iconoclast Is a monumental artwork which was realised through the Southern way McClelland commision in conjunction with Lend Lease and Victoria roads. The work was selected from a field of national and international artists to be positioned on the East link highway (Skye Rd exit) in Frankston, Victoria. The work will remain overlooking the highway for four years and be relocated to it’s permanent home at the McClelland sculpture park and gallery.

Iconoclast is a twelve metre high, 6.8 tonne steel and concrete structure based on the form of a mangled electricity pylon which has become absurdly mangled under the weight of a large boulder. This large steel structure is an iteration and further development of his previous series: Everything’s Broken.

Fundamentally, this project is bound to a studio practice that relates to cause and effect, matching like for like, metaphor with material, and biography with action. In my work and methods; stability, uncertainty, and opposing forces engage with a narrative drawn from my personal biography. Slippages and mistakes are ‘baited’ and weaknesses celebrated. The working system is one of chance, control and biography, the links between which are revealed through the making process. The materials are encouraged to display their intrinsic properties but preserved and frozen in particular states subject to my control according to their expressive capacities. The culmination of the research, Iconoclast , explores these qualities on a monumental scale.

The work references the fragility of the human experience in both a physical and mental sense and was prompted by the death of my parents. As the project developed it took on more of an eco-political meaning during the construction, friends had sent me images of the 23 electricity pylons that had collapsed or been damaged in South Australia due to a severe thunderstorm. This event caused widespread blackouts and highlighted the need for an ongoing discussion regarding energy and renewables. So, while the work may have emerged from my own studio-based exploration of material and metaphor, chance and control, Iconoclast could also be read as a statement of about the limits of grid-based energy in the present moment and the way in which nature seems to continually remind us about the limits of human systems and structures.

The work was developed from models and fabricated in a collaboration between myself and Davis Thomas studio’s at Mt Nebo, Queensland with artist and fabricator- Briony Law. CAD drawings shown are credited to Davis Thomas and Photography generously offered by Steve Brown.