Overview

18 Lives in Paradise (The Installation) takes form as a makeshift wall, representative of a barrier or border to demarcate the poles of inclusion and exclusion, functioning to protect or prohibit. In a reconfigured form, these blocks may also be read as a totem, a beacon to guide or an epitaph to commemorate; a way to look to the future, or to the past.

Comprising a series of eighteen images screen-printed on cardboard boxes, the various compositions create an alluring metaphor of what it is to construct a picture of exoticism. Sourced from found postcards, the images range from the early to mid twentieth century, representing a curiosity in indigenous people, circus acts and personalities, distant landscapes, missionaries and military servicemen. The images come together as an assemblage of oddities representing the collisional paths of indigenous and non-indigenous cultures; those being documented for curiosity and those of a dominant culture who have colonised, either briefly or permanently, both land and people for wealth, resources, labour and pleasure.

The boxes emulate the form and materiality of the commonplace courier box, utilised for transitting of cargoes and resources from one location to another, these are vessels within which many anonymous contents shift between hands, between custodians, between owners. These blocks operate as signifiers of the gaze, referencing what has been discovered and captured, while their content remains vacuous.