This week's window showcased paper Bird sculptures by southern Tasmanian-based artist Erin Tappe, who created these works after an Arts Tasmania Residency at Lake St. Claire in 2008.
The birds form part of Tappe's ongoing surveying and cataloging of her surroundings and the nature of scientific observational documentation (referencing Darwin and other well-documented colonial era explorers to the island).
Tappe writes of her work for her recent exhibition, Type and Divergence: Surveys From Everyday Life:
"Science is often perceived as antipathetic to human qualities such as empathy and humour, yet for many, science has replaced religion in contemporary thought as the basis for our understanding of the world. My personal conviction is in science, it is with a mixture of seriousness admiration and amusement I look to Darwin as the Messiah like figure in this system of belief. Darwin’s charming, do-it-yourself home experiments are typified in his mastering the use of an inclinometer (for measuring slope) on his bedroom furniture. The notion of measuring objects so closely linked to personal experience touches on a human desire for certainty and truth, and to the strong poetic and emotional undercurrents that are embedded in scientific striving.
My interests have long been natural history and botany. However, as I have explored scientific forms and methods through my art practice over a number of years I have come to dwell on the natural world less and less, finding the act of comprehending my surrounds via collection, documentation and pattern recognition satisfying in any environment: bushland, domestic or urban."
Each bird has been created using the waste packaging from food that Tappe took with her to live on during the residency, as being a National Park, one must always take one's rubbish out when one leaves the park. This meant that Tappe could draw parallels between the everyday observations of her interior as well as exterior environments whilst undertaking the residency, and give form and meaning to materials usually considered waste products.
The birds are for sale and for all enquiries please contact the gallery at: Artifakt.Gallery@gmail.com
