PRIMAVERA (2009) Excerpt of essay by Jeff Kahn
…Western Australian artist Roderick Sprigg’s installation Mechanical Nuisance invokes the remoteness and isolation of his home town to explore the fractured and inert interior emotional states that haunt our experience of contemporary masculinity.
Presently based in Mukinbudin, a wheatbelt farming community approximately 300km north-east of Perth, Sprigg has based his practice in an ongoing investigation of the politics and nuances of masculine identity, quietly questioning its capacity to sustain broader social structures and nurture meaningful relationships. Raised in a rural farming culture where stoicism, strength and resilience are experienced as necessities in the ongoing struggle with the land that traditional farming practices demand, Sprigg’s work investigates and reconsiders the materials and psychology of farming life, and the translation of those values from the working realm into the domestic sphere and broader community.
Mechanical Nuisance, Sprigg’s layered installation for Primavera 2009, presents a complex interweaving of figure, machine and landscape. At the heart of Mechanical Nuisance is a sculptural replica of a family dining table, rendered from the discarded safety guards which farmers habitually remove from their equipment before taking it out to work the fields. According to Sprigg, farmers prefer to work unhindered by these guards, risking possible injury in order to work more quickly and productively. In using them as a base material, Sprigg’s table ironically re-introduces the notion of guards and restriction at a domestic level, at a site where family conversation, connection and exchange are supposed to be shared. This brings to mind several contrasts, most notably the solitary, ‘unguarded’ figure of a man working the fields, with the guarded and restricted spectre of his return to the domestic sphere and failure to communicate with loved ones. The installation is completed by the nearby presence of looming, ghostly figures projected onto Perspex screens, the shape of which are drawn from the forms of the safety guards themselves. The projected footage follows the men of Sprigg’s family as they transition from their interior, domestic space to the vast, flat expanse of the farmland that they tend. The sparse, tense spatial arrangement of the Mechanical Nuisance installation mirrors the solitude of the figures in this remote, unforgiving setting, creating a melancholic air and sense of absence which underpins the work’s conception of masculine identity.
Jeff Kahn. Curator of PRIMAVERA 2009
Photo by Jenni Carter
