The Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award

Werribee Park, March 22 - April 30 2001
{Cliff Burtt}

It would be best to declare my interest right at the start. Along with probably half the country's sculptors, I put my hand up for the inaugural Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award. Not getting in was no great surprise. After all, there are quantities of talented sculptors about to chase the award, worth some $100,000. Besides, years of applications to the Australia Council have inured me to rejection, so it was with only the slightest tinge of rancor that I surveyed the grounds of Werribee mansion.

The idea behind the award seems to have been that a large prize would have the greatest impact in an area of the visual arts that has seen few of the pots of gold that dot the arts scene from time to time. It might have been a better idea to have had several smaller prizes instead of one big one (the award also has a popular choice prize).

If there was an award for sheer energy, Mathieu Gallois would be the prime contender. His styrene fast-food outlet, Drive Thru, complete with sign and play equipment, was a triumph of industry. More material and effort has been expended on this temporary structure than on the average third-world shanty, although- and we can only presume this is part of Gallois' joke - it disintegrated even faster. Presumably delaminating sheets and finger-pocked styrene is part of the critique the artist is making of consumer culture. And one cannot help but warm to the man: quite a few artists will confess to being barking mad, but not many to attempting to eat an A-grade listed carcinogen.

Gallois' work was one of several in the award that dealt, in one way or another, with habitations. At least half of the pieces selected dealt with this theme explicitly, and such a reading narratively enhanced even relatively abstract pieces. Deej Fabyc's Gateway to Mag Mell would be a good example. The polyurethane dolmen would serve as a pretty useful bus shelter, if it could be made vandal-proof. Another is Robert Owen's Double Vision, which directly quotes the twisted wreckage of Russell Drysdale's painting The Broken Mill. In case we missed the reference, Owen spelled it out for us on the info. panel, and if that wasn't enough, we were presented with a stamp-sized image of the Drysdale in the back of the catalogue. And who said modern artists are just trying to be obscure?


'Monument to Batman', 2001- Charles Robb
Image Courtesy of the Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award- Photographer: Jeff Busby

Another dwelling of sorts was Kristian Burford's piece. Featuring a naked figure in a small greenhouse, it looked like Thoreau's famous communion with the moss as interpreted by a producer of gay porn videos. If only the dioramas at Movieworld or Planet Hollywood had this much sexual tension. My companion was disturbed at possible references to Werribee's previous incarnation as a seminary, but, then again...

Given the selection committee's predilection for work dealing with dwellings, it was unsurprising that the winning entry should be Karen Ward's Hut. It's a good piece, with spare lines and planes, the sort of thing that a child might devise if asked to design a house on stilts. It closely matches the colours and tones of the enclosing pines, and this pseudo-forest setting reinforces the notion that this might be a shrine of sorts, or a mausoleum. And of course, the key referent in this setting is the looming bulk of Werribee mansion itself, with its residues of transposed culture, colonial ambitions and ghosts.

Claire Healy's Formica Tower appeared to openly mock the old mansion. Cocooned in a grid of scaffolding, its caravan was suspended not just in time (somewhere in the sixties, at a guess), but in space as well, 'in geo-synchronous orbit, 80 centimeters above sea level' as the artist's blurb revealed.

The wit and brevity of Healy's note was hardly matched by the explication panels of Simeon Nelson's Pollinator Phenotype and Richard Goodwin's Exoskeleton Pod. Flimsy stands supported even less substantial text, a sort of 'lite theory', easy enough to swallow but, we suspect, indigestible for most of the audience. Nelson's work is a direct decendant of work that was much in vogue in the British art scene of the sixties, while Goodwin's piece suggested the remains of a sci-fi set. Perhaps it could have been called The Return of Mir.

Another theme or device popular amongst the art was the grid, particularly notable in Louise Lavarak's Grand Plan and Susan Milne's Curved Plain, along with the pieces by Nelson and Healy. Patterning also got a run in the award, with fine works by Robert Bridgewater, Donna Marcus, Neil Taylor and Bronwyn Oliver. These sculptures had a direct aesthetic attraction that might not appeal to those seeking theoretical sophistication.

The remainder of the work covered a mixed bag, with a heavy lean toward kitsch or nostalgia. The effect, taken as a whole, suggests quite a broad sweep by the selectors. Perhaps it is simply the nature of the beast that is the open competition that these exhibitions will give every appearance of being unfocussed. Often the works selected suffer as a result of this. The parallel tasks of curating a show and selecting a prize are quite different, and perhaps incompatible.

A substantial part of the raison d'être of the curator lies in the selection and placement of artworks in such a way that they act as counterpoints to each other. Well constructed exhibitions create a dialogue between the viewer and the works, and between the works themselves. A major factor in the selection of any given piece will lie in its capacity to contribute to the context thus created.

Prize exhibitions are run on an entirely different agenda, and are generally selected to be broadly inclusive, and the Lempriere fits the pattern. Works range from straight-up figurative pieces to quite severely `conceptual` abstraction; sizes range from small pedestal to that of a house - quite literally. Materials cover the gamut, from bronze and stone to styrene and kitchen scourers. In short, the Lempriere award offers pretty well something for everyone, a bit like the spread at Sizzlers.

As for the artists, there is a strong temptation to tweek aesthetic values, and above all grossly overscale their work in the hope of producing that magical winning entry. The result, for the viewer, is something akin to aesthetic indigestion. As the afternoon drew to a close, and the atmosphere gathered in the dank, slightly acrid scent of the decomposing efflua of the adjoining treatment works, one felt just a tad bloated on the smorgasboard of art. Still, it's a grand day out.

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