Oppositional Shrines, 2018

Acrylic paint, bone, clay, cotton thread, resin, silicone, wood

In this work, I created a shrine where the self is removed, and it is designed with consideration to the objects and sites involved. The wombat skull I found while bushwalking in Wonthaggi, so I have directed it towards South Gippsland in reverence of its origins and where it had existed entirely before I had found it.

I made a relief cast of the skull and cast the middle four digits of the sheep spine and moulded them into a sheet of foam core cut to the same size of the plinths. I articulated the bones of the spine using the same string from the hand sculpture and installed them over the cast.

I emphasised the foreground through a visual hierarchy of stepping and floating objects. I used black paint to create a fanning design using my arms and painted a single crying eye looking upwards in the top centre to reference the crying hands sculpture.