You Found Me on the Footpath

138 Gallery
23rd November 2024

Artists: Cllawde and Joseph Doggett-Williams.


Looking at one Cllawd’s arrows with butterfly wings stuck to the end of it, I’m reminded of a quote from the 2000 documentary Beijing Swings. In it, the artist Sun Yuan reflects, “One of my greatest experiences was when I learned that the human body cannot represent a human being’s feelings. Inside the morgue, there is not a living soul in sight.” Similarly, her studio is filled with things that once lived or had a life of their own, now repurposed as part of someone else’s narrative.


I’m looking at a photo of a pile of clothes on the floor, this photo seems unremarkable to some, but to the person who knows its history, who wore the clothes and knows where they've been, the photo carries a symbolic weight, “sentience even,” says Cllawde. “That’s why I like taking photos backstage at gigs or before things are set up,” she explains. “It’s about the moments surrounding the stated purpose of why everyone’s there. Until we’re on stage or in a photo, we’re just a pile of clothes on the floor.”


The works in this exhibition resist comprehension and interpretation or defy it entirely. They’re stories without a storyteller— or stories told by those who can’t. Imagine the caption beside each simply reads: “you had to be there.” Music, for Cllawde, has becomes both a metaphor and a tool. “Collecting, capturing, and seeking to preserve things is an all-too-human pursuit,” she says. “Maybe it’s an attempt to assert control over the uncontrollable. To defy the corrosive effects of time. Attempting to express something fully so others will understand is perhaps even more challenging. Yet we still feel compelled to try.


This fragility resonates in Joseph’s work, where transformation is equally important. A sculpture of two squirrels, originally a small ornament he found in Allora, Queensland, is recreated through a of fabrication and reinvention: A printed squirrel is copied from a smaller ornament of a squirrel, copied from an actual squirrel.
The butterfly wings on Cllawde’s arrows and Joseph’s squirrel shares this tension. Both were once alive, their existence fleeting yet with a purpose of their own. Now, they exist as objects of art - mute in an art gallery - with traces of their former vitality.


What was left behind in this transformation? What was left on the footpath, discarded and deemed irrelevant?


The materials that Joseph employs in his works, include sediment scavenged from the University of Melbourne’s old geology building skip, gifted astroturf, borrowed wood, paint and found items - the squirrels are patched together like debris and fur blown together by the wind.


“These works engage forms in a Frankenstein sort-of way. And as such, the results also come out imperfectly, dissembled parts pretending to be something they’re not.” The show features wood carvings, frottage, arrows, recreations of objects that contain deliberate imperfections, or perhaps reflect an inability to avoid them. “Traditionally, art was about depicting nature and the likeness of a subject. Now, it seems to be reconstructing nature through fragmented ways,” I suggest. Cllawde agrees.


On 'You Found Me on the Footpath' by Spike F.