Coming Down the Creek in Good Time

Coming Down the Creek In Good Time
is about what I imagine it was like before.
It is like this still and
It will be like this in the future.

Thoughts

This work is a scene from the past, from the present and from the future. I am alluding to an earlier life of Australians, to different life conditions. There are places still that do not make this work historical or fictional. There are places and times ahead of us which this work seeks to represent.

These figures come out of memory which is compiled of stuff from life as seen. It comes from representations from art, from the best and worst of all art and artifact. It comes from my sense of what is appropriate and also the limits of my understanding. It comes from propoganda, correctness, hype. It comes from my coniderations. Above all else however, the figures emerge from drawing. With drawing, you cannot design. Drawing extracts that which the mind conceals. You accept, to a large extent what the drawing delivers once the programme has been set.

The figure is not widely applied to contemporary art. It is my belief that there is life in the figure still without re-coursing to history’s models. The figure can be used to refer to a contemporary condition. It is in combination with other figures, that the potential of the figure is particularly evident and relevant here. We exist in relation to one another. We become more complete in our relations with others. We become part of the movement and rhythm of humanity. Often representations of groups of figures in art refer to conditions of violence, disease, revolution, angst. This group of people is at peace. They are walking down the creek to go fishing, “In good time”. There is an absence of haste and anxiety. There is a sense of communion, and an accidental or spontaneous dance. The figure and its relationship with architecture needs to be meaningfuly reawakened. These figures can occupy that idealised space.

We are imagining. We are remembering. We are wishfully thinking. We are getting it right and wrong more often. We are putting all the bits together, fragments of what was here. We are presenting it here as the place which is as far as we have got which is further than before but not far enough. It is a celebration and an apology; it may be a ‘romancing’. It may be naive. This sculpture documents the contemporary view for what it is.

© Michael Snape 1973-2008