On Time

Abstract

he National 2021: New Australian Art was the third iteration of a biennial Australian contemporary art survey initiated in 2017 and developed collaboratively by major Sydney art institutions. In 2021, The National seemed to offer a hopeful end to COVID-19 isolation. It also signalled the return of Carriageworks, a significant cultural and visual arts venue in Sydney, which underwent voluntary administration in May 2020, standing down all casual staff and half of its permanent workforce.Footnote1 Unsecured creditors, such as artists, freelance art workers, and small art organisations, received 20–30% of their debts.Footnote2 I was one of those unsecured creditors. In this socioeconomic climate, I was invited to make and present an artwork for The National of 2021. My art practice is process-driven and relational, addressing the contexts of its cultural production. On Time was made within the context of Carriageworks’s voluntary administration, while I was also working as a sessional academic amongst numerous other casual workers, whose precarity was highly heightened during COVID-19. For this work, I conducted twelve one-hour interviews with casual front and back-of-house staff during 2020. I formed these multiple conversations into a poetic monologue, recalibrating them through language, gesture, and installation. On two occasions, once at the opening and again at the closing of the exhibition, I performed this monologue, sending these thoughts back out as an ‘atmosphere of time’ to create a new reading of causal labour and the site of Carriageworks.

The performance occurred amongst twelve clock hands forged from steel, placed in abstracted clock face formation. Each of these represented one person, marking both the labour of the Carriageworks employee and the venue’s history as a foundry. These clock hands form a setting that I moved through during the performance. The sculptures are the material realisation of the linguistic paradox of labour and value, and represent what happens when casualness is placed into something so permanent as steel.

The script is divided into six scenes, each printed on a page. Each page was placed on a stage housing the sculptures and performed in six gestures, choreographed with the twelve clock hands over a duration of 24 minutes. Show more