Weatherman UFOlogy (Kandos Occupation)
Cementa_13 enabled me to install my UFO in the beautiful garden of Christine MacMillan, a local Kandos resident, former Kandos High School art teacher and an artist who works in Bathurst. I visited Dunne’s Swamp, just near Kandos, early after I designed my UFO project in 2005, and I saw the most amazing pagoda forms in the escapement and at Dunne’s Swamp swimming hole, and that is where I developed my imagination for installing the UFO at a campsite. Spending time at Wallerawang, another small township in the Central West region where my parents are building a house, I also developed an imagination for installing the UFO at the Delta Power Station at Wang, so the idea of exploring a collapsing mining industry with industrial ruins resonated strongly with UFO project. My first Artspace residency to develop the UFO was working towards installing the UFO at this coal power station. However the UFO is such a large and complex structure with new, entirely self-funded and unusual industrial design requirements, which has meant that the project has taken many years. I mentioned Lucas Heights Power Station too in one of my early UFO proposals. My second Artspace residency for this UFO project mentioned working with Lithgow High School students for one of the performance installations. So the UFO has always been about sites and people as well as a structure.
As someone who was born in Sydney and grew up in Bathurst, with friends at the alternative community called No Name out past Mudgee, I was thrilled to hear about Cementa first from a message from David Haines via Facebook and then from Ian Milliss in person. I am a product of Sydney-based parents buying into the 1970’s government program of decentralisation, when there was work incentive to move to Bathurst. I was able to participate in Cementa_13 after meeting Georgie Pollard, Alex Wisser and Anne Finnegan and resolving the physical structure of the UFO at Ian Milliss’ enormous shed at Wallerawang. Over summer it meant working in 50+ degree heat, as the corrugated iron shed amplified the heat wave into an oven. A visit to Kandos during the January heatwave with Georgie, Alex and Emma involved passing the Wallerawang power station together and it was obvious how great it would be to install the UFO at such a site, evoking scenes from so much science fiction we are all familiar with.
The UFO, a large tent, camping and living materials, my bicycle and most of my studio/installation resources were transported in two cars and trailer with the help of my parents, as I don’t drive. The UFO itself is made of modular units and packs down to half of the trailer. The first day I arrived I assembled the minaret, the next smallest section of the UFO and part of the wooden base of the UFO, working by torch light until 10pm. My folks helped set up the tent and mum stayed to help with the UFO. The second day mum called dad to come out and help again as she didn’t think we would make the installation deadline. Christine, as well as Sue Pedley and Virginia Heyward, who were also staying at Christine’s, gave some crucial help. Then Alex kindly arranged ten Cementa artists and volunteers to come around in the evening to help lift put the bottom two layers in place, as the joined segments of these larger sections are heavy and awkward to lift into place. When I tested the installation at Artspace last year with the help of Occupy Sydney, with whom I was working with, I discovered I had used an old measurement for the UFO from a design where the base was deeper and that a more robust internal structure was required. So having re-measured and redesigned the internal structure in Ian’s studio I was able to install the UFO as a largely resolved structure for the first time and test it outdoors. It proved to be a sturdy structure and resilient to the wind, rain and the rigors and bumps of some local children called Coddy and Connor, who returned three days in a row to act out space ship fight scenes. Before I could bolt the minaret on, the wind blew it off whilst everyone including myself was at the opening party at Down the Tracks Café and the Railway Hotel. Then, with sci-fi and action genre inspiration, the cheeky kids punched it off again. As it is made from high-impact acrylic Perspex it didn’t break. The minaret is quite thin, having used heated sheet of 3mm Perspex to slump and stretch into a curved mould, but the material is highly specialised and commonly used in riot shields and shatterproof architectural elements, so it is quite robust. Four moulds were used to create forms that could be repeated and assembled together to create a spherical UFO form. I plan to exhibit these extremely heavy and bulky moulds made from fibreglass and industrial-grade wood at Alaska artist run space in Kingscross in July, in a group show ‘The Carpentry of Speculative Thinking’ curated by Prue Gibson. I also hope to create a mini artist book showing the UFO at Cementa_13, as there were some many hybrid events involving interactions with people and light that became participatory and/or performative moments that invited extended documentation. I learnt a lot about the UFO and the way people and light interact with it. People generously gave advice too, suggesting other objects such as pillows, food, books, mosquitos nets as well as other ‘landing sites’, incorporation of media and other possible performance scenarios. I have considered many such things myself, but as an artist who is working with ‘other beings’ I relished this ‘user feedback’ and the fact that people sensed they should be involved in the development of what is a quasi-architectural structure. Cementa_13 proved to me that the UFO extends beyond artwork into a shared social design experiment that reaches beyond individual authorship and requires collaboration and contingencies.
I met so many artists, art enthusiasts and locals at Cementa, and the whole experience of working on such a demanding project and having so many other exciting events and sites to track down and experience was a very rich experience that was as energising and inspiring – just as it was also extremely exhausting and overwhelming! As well as having opportunity to hang out with old friends in a new context, I met many new artists and finally met a few online-only art friends, such as Ruth Skillbeck, who interviewed me in the UFO and engaged me in some great discussion. Ruth’s interview was constantly interrupted by others joining us inside the UFO, and then it turned into another interview for the Cementa film documentary. A visiting curator from Campbelltown Art Gallery, Michael Dagostino, found himself suddenly co-opted as an interviewer for the documentary. I accidentally spent almost half of the first exhibition day inside the UFO being interviewed, but in a way that was fragmentary and incorporating dialogue and voices and actions of a wide range of engaging participants. These fragmented conversation threads and interactions often went in circles, picking up and letting go of people passing through. I was delighted to see that so many people literally dived into the UFO, often in a headfirst and awkward downward dog then upward dog action. Many viewing participants reported exiting the UFO as an experience akin to birth or being reborn from the UFO with their arms, bellies and legs pressed into the earth and the structure. Children loved the UFO, which was a source of extreme delight whilst raising the question of how to ensure it did not just become playground or cubby house equipment. A number of art dogs came inside with their owners too. Early in the day there were beads and veins of moisture forming as condensation on the inside of the UFO, later as it became hot, an infusion of eucalypt and pine foliage activated the atmosphere inside the UFO. I hadn’t had time to remove two colourful cordless drills from the inside of the UFO, and many viewers chose to fictionalise them as ‘Ray Guns’. Lithgow high school art teacher Sean OKeefe popped by with two final year Lithgow High School students, Rowen and Sage. We talked enthusiastically about the possibility of working together on the performance and media elements of UFO, which, as mentioned earlier has been part of the project’s long-term goal.
The official project name is ‘Weatherman UFOlogy’, and for Cementa_13 I created a new work stage called ‘Weatherman UFOlogy (Kandos Occupation)’.This name references my work with Occupy Sydney and my dream of having the UFO involved in some kind of staying-overnight ‘occupation’, where irregular structures involving tents, tarps, sleeping bags, cardboard boxes, crates and yoga mats are used to facilitate ‘social movement’. But this idea of ‘Occupation’ might also resonate differently for the people of Kandos, where employment is low, especially now with the close of the Cement works. As a sometimes employed artist who has self-funded a relatively expensive project with a range of odd jobs ranging from telemarketing work to personal and marketing assistant work to lecturing at university I am interested in the way the UFO might inspire people to think about ‘post-industrial’ industrial design and the creative potentials of precarious casual (un)employment, perpetual study and vagrant artistic activisms. The money I have spent on this project could easily buy a new car, or alternatively be a deposit for a decent old house in Kandos – and the form of the UFO suggests something of a strange nomadic vehicular home. I would not have been able to complete this project without the generous gift help of Ian Milliss’ studio which was built to repair buses … such studios are too expensive for me to rent in Sydney. I would not have been able to test the UFO without access to flat-ground at Christine’s enormous backyard, a section of which was once graded for two semi-trailler trucks. For me, Cementa was an opportunity to participate in a social and artistic experiment, and to become involved in an intense and creative exchange between country and city folks, an exchange process I have engaged in all my life. The UFO facilitated the sharing and blurring of roles of artist and viewer, and Cementa itself asked all artists to be very active viewers as well. Jurgen Kerkovis from Artspace did a spontaneous nude performance and slept overnight in the UFO. I also slept within the UFO on an earlier occasion and documented view that I woke up to. On a very separate occasion some school children taught by Christine spent an extended time interacting with the UFO as well as the many elf-like dresses made from men’s neckties that I brought out on the last day of the exhibition. I plan to use these ‘ELF dresses’ in a future UFO performance. I have many photos and video documentations of viewer interaction that still need to be processed into new related documentation artworks.
In my many discussions with people at Cementa I often discussed some sustained themes that have been driving the UFO over the years:
-
UFO as ‘irregular shelter’ of utopian counterculture and emergency DIY activism, such as hex and geodesic domes.
-
Centripetal surveillance aesthetics.
-
Visuality through transparent exo-skeleton, reflective surface and light-diffusion, exploring optics like it is a giant distorted contact-lens.
-
UFO as a ‘mother wheel’, using a term of Louis Farakhan which connects the UFO to the idea of a large breast.
-
It is evocative of my late teenage artistic and spiritual obsession with jellyfish.
-
It engages (or will engage) with mythology of Weathermen activism, whilst also exploring the form as a semi-inhabitable Weather shelter within the age of climate change.
-
ELF punnings references Earth Liberation Front guerrilla activism; Extremely Low Frequencies of occult and electromagentic phenomena; and the use of elf-like dresses with pointy-tipped hems, and telecommunications wire woven into elf-like pointy-tipped balaclavas.
-
UFO panels as potential riot shields.
-
UFO nicknamed ‘The Large Perspex’ in homage to Marcel Duchamp’s ‘The Large Glass’ (or ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even’) is a work that engages with transparent phenomena, industrial design and cyborg telepathy.
-
UFO as a semi-inhabitable and transportable art and media museum / performance laboratory.
-
UFO’s obsession attention to excessive curves associated with automobile design, aerodynamic 3D surfaces and the impossible design mythology of air-slicing UFOs.
- UFO as a geodesic dome and hot house for plants.
Surely too many ideas for one artwork! But works such as Duchamp’s ‘Large Glass’ have a precident for facilitating complex metanarratives over extended times frames. ‘The Large Glass’ took over 8 years to make, and ‘The Large Perspex’ is now entering its eighth year. I started this work at the end of my PhD and in some ways it carries the intensity and longevity of my explorations of telepathy in contemporary, conceptual and performance art. It is like a great big ball of visual telepathy, with a plastic ‘crystal ball’ at its apex, a manhole for facilitating interaction and performative departures.
Prior to Cementa_13 I also devised a quick virtual world performance with my online collaborator Jeremy Owen Turner, who is based in Vancouver Canada. We were able to open a virtual room called ‘Kandoz’ within the Blue Mars Lite virtual world, with the help of Hashimoto Kazuyuki. With the UFO demanding so much real world work we ran out of time to do something more in Blue Mars Lite for Cementa_13. Blue Mars Lite is especially good for exploring the google-street-view perspective of Kandos and the situationist aesthetics of gaming. Jeremy and I plan to develop this more, and to import a UFO prop for our avatars to experiment with. I also developed another backup proposal for Kandos, just in case finishing the epic UFO was not enough, or perhaps too much! I plan to research actual UFO sightings in the area, as I have heard that the area is renowned for its UFO witness events. I am also keen to return with the UFO and further explore the landscape as a character, specifically the campsite and pagoda form at the swimming hole at Dunne’s swamp. The UFO invites future collaborations with other artists, virtual and local, as well as children, dogs … and other beings. I am hoping to develop these Kandos and UFO related works in the future.
So, although I have brought years of UFO-centric work and obsession to Kandos, Cementa_13 meant that it Weatherman UFOlogy (Kandos Occupation) was especially open to dialogue, dependency and collaboration and exchange with the local context. It was transformative for the project and myself, and I think my UFO helped contribute to the wider creative social experiment of Cementa.
Jacquelene Drinkall is Honorary Research Associate at the School of Art History and Theory at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales. Material assistance for ‘Weatherman UFOlogy’ was given by York Precision Plastics. Special thanks to Dot Melbourne and Pete Drinkall, Ian Milliss, Christine MacMillan and many artists and helpers of Cementa_13.