Interview with Brigita Ozolins

Brigita Ozolins’ Kryptos is one of the most liked artworks at Mona. The Hobart-based artist and academic now has a second installation, Graphos, at the museum within Mark Changizi’s section of the current exhibition, On The Origin of Art. I talked to Ozolins about her lifelong fascination with language, 60s Minimalists, her response to Changizi’s ‘nature harnessing’ theory, and the very reason why she makes art.

Tell me about your art practice.

It’s about exploring our relationship to language, to books, to the way we store and sort information, to codification, and to an essential mystery I see associated with the process of writing. It’s inspired by my love of books and literature and libraries. My interest in all these things stems from growing up in a family where we spoke Latvian as well as English, and my parents spoke a number of different languages so I’ve been fascinated, or exposed always to this idea of different ways people express themselves.  When I speak Latvian, something different that happens in my brain, the way I express myself and my thinking. There’s something slightly different there and I think it changes with each language. They’re the concepts underpin my ideas, that I’m interested in conveying - our complex and paradoxical relationship to language. On one hand language is an extraordinary tool. It enables us to express our thoughts and ideas and our feelings, and to describe our place in the world, but at the same time it’s not an accurate reflection of reality. It’s something in a constant state of flux and change.  And it changes as our perceptions of the world and our understanding of the world changes. I’m interested in trying to convey that gap between reality and what language does. That’s where the mystery is for me. I think we have this paradoxical relationship to language as a result of that. One of the key strategies I’ve used in my works is to promise meaning but also deny access to meaning.

Could you give me example?

In Kryptos, the walls are lined with binary code. As you enter Kryptos and experience it more and more, you start to see there are some English words in amongst the code. There is this promise of meaning embedded in this code, that it’s not simply patterns of zeros and ones on the walls… but ultimately the viewer’s access to that meaning is denied. Hopefully you get a tantalising glimpse where you may start to question your own relationship to language.

Does that mean the artist statement is key to interpreting the work?

I like to think that people can have an experience in my work that affects them. They can have an experience about the work – a rich experience – without having to know my specific intentions. People might go into Kryptos and say ‘oh wow, I loved being in that work’, but they don’t need to know that the text is from the Epic of Gilgamesh, and that it’s to do with a man coming face to face with his own mortality as Gilgamesh does.

I think that’s an indicator of a successful artwork, and one of the things I like about Kryptos: you can read the artist statement if you wish, but really you can enter the work from any level.

And that’s my aim. People say ‘oh wow, now you’ve told me about the Epic of Gilgamesh, I feel as if I really understand what the work is about.’ But I don’t think that way. Reading my artist statement and finding out what I was thinking and so on may add some other dimensions to your understanding of the work, but I really don’t think it’s necessary to get that work.

I’m not sure if it’s the same with my new installation. Graphos is a response to Mark Changizi’s ideas [on the origin of art], which are very specific and from a scientist’s point of view. I’ve tried to create another experience that evokes his ideas but is also poetic in some way.

He tells us that language is all around us. We develop it because of our relationship to nature and the world around us. We see certain objects in relation to each other... we see angles and lines and intersections that then become the basis of an alphabet in any language. [However, his interest is in] the formal structure of language, whereas I’m more interested in the content and meaning of what we say.

I was drawn to Changizi’s minimalist diagrams in his book [The Vision Revolution], and the three large objects [in Graphos] come directly from his diagrams. The first thing I thought of … was the work of the 1960s Minimalists like Robert Morris and Donald Judd.

Yeah, I was reminded of Robert Morris’ L Beams when seeing your work.

It’s an obvious conversation that I’m having with 60s Minimalists. But my work’s created out of wood, so that’s my reference to nature and the world around us. The objects also contain sound. One thing Changizi says is that the actual forms of language come from seeing objects in relationship to nature in the natural world. He says the actual sounds of language come from the sound of body in motion in the world, and basically from three types of sound: hits, slides and rings. It might be the stamp of a foot, a body hitting something and the reverberations that come from that. I interpreted those things as quite percussive sounds, and so they’re the sounds you get in Graphos. I think they’re a little avant-garde, a little bit 50s and 60s. They have an experimental beatnik sound to them. But then you get voices intermingled with that that are sounding out the phonemes of the words that line the walls of Graphos, which say ‘around us everything is writing’. Those words are a direct quote… from a beautifully poetic work by the late Marguerite Duras … about what it is to be a writer and the process of writing.

Changizi says a similar thing, but from the viewpoint of the scientist: that writing is everywhere. I think writing is embedded in the world around us. So Graphos is the merging of the scientist, the writer and the visual artist. They’re three different ways of thinking about writing, but they have interconnections.

Both works have a really interesting relationship to the human body through scale and movement. That was something the Minimalists were doing too – L-Beams was designed to be walked around and viewed in relation to the space and the body.

I was thinking about the relationship people would have to the forms in the space, but I was also thinking about the dimensions of the space and the size you would need to command the space in a particular way. 

But I’m also quite practical as an artist, and I designed them to the standard sizes that the plywood panels come in because it makes it so much easier to construct. It’d be really interesting to look at the origin of those dimensions. It’d be related to what the human body can make practically and also handle. 

It’s similar to the standardisation of photographs and paintings. Why are they usually rectangular and hung in ‘landscape’ or ‘portrait’ orientations?

Yes exactly. So my objects work with those standard dimensions, which also gives them a sense of proportion.

One thing that I notice in your installations is a sense of excitement, play and anticipation.

I think that really works in Kryptos. In Graphos it’s a different experience because you don’t have separate spaces. It’s one big all-encompassing space. A number of people have said to me that they enjoy being in there, that it feels very warm and comforting. The wood makes them reasonably sensuous objects that you would like to go up and stroke. It’s quite different to Kryptos which creates a little bit of anxiety.

One is very cold and the other very warm.

Yeah, one’s a crypt really. It uses concrete steel and glass – materials that are naturally cold. Whereas Graphos uses organic materials – it’s all wood.  There’s this idea that it’s still breathing and contracting and changing with the environment in a different way to steel and concrete, which are manmade materials.

Although to be fair, plywood is manmade.

Yes, but it’s still made of wood.

I was buying my sister’s new baby a toy the other day, and I thought back to Roland Barthes’ essay on plastic where he talks about wood with its warmth and soft sound.

We do respond to wood. I don’t like glass tables. I think it’s slightly scary. That timber and the rich grain in parts of it with those embedded letters feels inviting and all encompassing. It’s that idea of ‘around us everything is writing’.

Lastly, why do you make art?

For me, it’s a way of thinking in three or four dimensions. It’s a way of realising my thoughts physically, and it’s a way of distilling a lot of seemingly disparate thoughts, or seemingly disparate thoughts and interconnections between ideas. Art can be a combination of anything and everything that you’re thinking and that you’re interested in. In art, I can combine my love of literature, my love of film, a phrase that I’ve read in a book, or heard in a film that evokes a powerful idea about something. It can combine all my interests and passions. Then the great challenge as an artist is to distil those ideas into something three-dimensional - or four-dimensional if I’m using sound or time-based media - into something that makes your thinking concrete. It’s like the process of writing. Writing allows me to think. It’s only through the process of writing that my thoughts become real. [Making art is] a similar process in that it enables me to see my ideas and extend them even further. And sometimes when you make art you don’t realise what those thoughts are until years later. You review the work in a different way from what you did at the time you were making it. You do some writing at some point in time, and then you express thoughts at that time, and then later on you read it and you go ‘oh hey, there’s some really interesting ideas – things that I haven’t quite expanded on.’ It’s a form of thinking and understanding your place in the world.

Visit www.brigitaozolins.com for images.

A shorter version of this interview was published in Warp Magazine, December 2016.

Disclosure note: The interviewer is a Mona employee.

Sculpture by the Sea: regressive and irrelevant?

Sculpture by the Sea needs a rethink.  Every year in November, I make the pilgrimage to Sydney to see the annual outdoor sculpture exhibition, where sculptures are installed along the picturesque cliffs from Bondi to Tamarama.  However, after this last experience (2010) I don’t think I’ll bother anymore.  Sculpture by the Sea (SS) has become commercial, boring, sameish, and conservative.  None of these criticisms, particularly my concern with the commercial emphasis of the festival, are bad per se as I know that large scale exhibitions need to be funded from multiple sources. However, the combination of these critical issues is turning what was initially an innovative and interesting exhibition, into an event that is losing relevance to many contemporary practicing artists, and ignoring the site’s true benefit, that is, its potential for site-specific art.

One of the few truly site-specific artworks in 2010: recycled plastic bottle 'icicles'

 Stylistically, most of the sculptures bear few similarities to the sculptures shown in contemporary galleries or even at other popular outdoor exhibitions around the world.  One of the things I’ve noticed over the years is an increase in monumental cast or assembled metal works, often bronze, and either rigidly abstract or nauseatingly figurative.  This last exhibition, in fact, gave me a sense of deja vou – it seemed that they’d re-exhibited the works from 2009.  Now, I have no problem with abstract work, nor bronze as a material, however, the works were so Caroesque that I was reminded of Charles Green’s comments in his book Peripheral Vision.  Green describes the gulf between the ‘older welded-steel sculptors and the younger post-object artists’ at the significant Mildura Sculpture Triennial one year.  Apparently, this evident generational gap ‘led to the enclave of formalist works being labelled “Karo Korner”’ (Green, 1995 p. 17).  I want to highlight the date of the exhibition: it was 1973. I believe that contemporary art has well and truly moved on from these traditional styles, styles that were becoming quickly irrelevant 40 years ago.  Of course, such sculptures are interesting when considered in their historical context, however I fail to see the relevance of such heavy, masculine, and permanent works (and I emphasise the more negative connotations of the adjectives) to contemporary culture and society.  Evidently, most museums and artists agree, and it’s really only at SS that I’ve witnessed such a popularity in this conservative and traditional artform.  I should probably add at this point, that Sir Anthony Caro was actually invited to exhibit in the 2010 SS.  I laughed when I saw his work, because I came across the massive structure plonked on the grassy cliff just as I was explaining to my friends what I mean by ‘Caroesque’.  I also need to emphaise that I enjoy Anthony Caro’s work, and my objection to the SS’s ‘Karo Korner’ is merely concerned with its relevance to 21^st century art practice.

So why is SS so regressive in their choice of artwork?  I understand that the works have to be durable due to their windy outdoor site, yet the exhibition is only for a couple of weeks and there are plenty of other materials and styles that can withstand such weather.  Perhaps it’s because most of the entries embraced more traditional materials and subjects; although I doubt it, because not only do most practicing Australian artists work in more contemporary media (based on what I see in both commercial and public galleries, artist websites, and my friends and colleagues’ work), but I know of many excellent and high-profile artists being turned down for proposals that engage with the site in relevant and interesting ways.  I also know that in past SS exhibitions, there have many more site-specific works of art.  My guess is that such sculptures sell.  Site-specific installations, regardless of their merit, do not sell as well as stand-alone works, simply because they often require a dialogue with the site to work properly.  Additionally, in terms of materials, bronze is easier to sell (particularly to a conservative public) because of its associations with wealth, permanency and tradition.  These works are safe; they don’t challenge the definition of art or cause controversy.  Yet, the sheer number of them in the last few years of SS has made the exhibition just that: safe, traditional, boring and conservative.

Imagine how innovative and interesting SS could be if they had more works that actually interacted with the site.  The landscape is incredible and calls out for playful and relevant artworks.  The cliffs, the thrashing waves, the wind, the sand, the handrails, the plants gripping onto the cliffs, the dripping water, the salt, the tourists, the gentrification of the area’s housing, the caves…  I mean, the site wants to be in dialogue with the sculptures, and yet the majority of the sculptures are simply ‘plonked’ there.  While public artworks for the last 40-odd years have been moving towards interactivity and relevance to the historical, special or cultural aspects of their respective sites, SS is regressive, returning to a pre-1970s public art and ignoring the wonderful developments in outdoor art which have flourished since Christo wrapped Little Bay in 1969. 

Let’s be proud of our country’s outstanding contemporary artists and make sure that SS, as one of the most popular and high-profile outdoor exhibitions, does justice to our thriving art scene.  For if I was a tourist from another country and witnessed only Sculpture by the Sea as illustrative of 21^st century art in Australia, I’d think were stuck in 1968.

John Davis: Presence, NGV Australia

I’ve been an admirer of John Davis’ sculptures since I came across a dusty black and white book in my first year of art school, and until his survey show, Presence, at the National Gallery Victoria, my enthusiasm had been based on mostly black and white photographic documentation of his delicate works.  John Davis’ sculptures are surely a museum conservator’s nightmare – constructions of twigs, paper, cotton, tied loosely together or bonded with bitumen – which is probably the reason why I’d never seen more than one of his works in person before this show.

Evolution of a Fish: Traveller (1990)

Repetition and an emphasis on material and process are consistent themes across the exhibition.  With the dramatic exception of the few sculptures from the late 1960s, which are surprisingly hard-edged and made from metal and fibreglass, his works indicate an element of play in their careful construction. His later forms are made from predominantly organic materials, and embrace an earthy and limited colour scheme – a reflection of Davis’ consistent exploration of environmental themes that started in the early 1970s.  Most of the works are wall or floor-based, and the white walls of the gallery provide an interesting contrast to the crooked grid lines that occur in numerous works.  This tension between the imperfections of the natural materials and the enforced construction of geometry is what makes Davis’ works so engrossing, and is perhaps also illustrative of the contradictory way in which humans perceive and interact with the natural environment.

Serendipitously, I visited the exhibition just after viewing the Tim Burton show at ACMI, and as a result Davis’ fish sculptures, which I’ve always considered quite serious pieces, started to look quite comical and animated with a monstrous streak.  While I doubt Davis had similar intentions to Burton when creating his fish characters, I enjoy ‘seeing’ this very different side to the Evolution of the Fish series. 

Tree Piece (1973), Sculpturscape

The show is set out chronologically, although I enter at the ‘wrong’ end because the start is strangely accessed through another exhibition, not the foyer.  Nevertheless, like a resume, sometimes it’s better to start with more recent activity - such as Davis’ ubiquitous fish sculptures - and work back.  My personal interest in Davis’ sculptures is in this early period of his career when he participated in the Mildura Sculpture Triennials, making site-related environmental works in the scrubby floodplains surrounding the Mildura Gallery.  Unfortunately, the significance and influence of the site and events, in particular the 1973 ‘Sculpturscape’ exhibition, are not even mentioned in the exhibition’s didactic texts.  The photographic documentation of Tree Piece (1973), where Davis wrapped a number of gum trees with various materials, is not attributed to any specific exhibition, despite Sculpturscape’s influence on not only Davis’ practice but also on the early development of Australian environmental sculpture, Installation and Site-specific Art in general.  Nevertheless, Presence, is an excellent and inclusive survey of Davis’ three-decade practice, and a welcome opportunity to view such fragile works in person; and the colour catalogue that accompanies the exhibition will also be a welcome addition to the existing, predominantly black and white illustrated publications on his work.

John Davis: Presence is at the NGV Australia, 6 August - 26 October 2010

image sources: 

NGV Australia website

Catalano, Gary. An Intimate Australia: the landscape and recent Australian art. Sydney: Hale and Ironmonger, 1985

Aniwaniwa: Brett Graham and Rachael Rakena, 10 Days on the Island 2009

Accompanied by my New Zealand flatmate, today I went and viewed Aniwaniwa, a video installation at the historic Rosny Barn, by New Zealand artists Brett Graham and Rachael Rakena. The work, which is part of Tasmania’s biannual arts festival, Ten Days on the Island, is an engrossing depiction of the flooding of the village Horahora, as part of a hydroelectric scheme.

The viewer is encouraged to lie on mattresses beneath the five round convex screens mounted within massive tyre-like forms that are suspended from the ceiling. Speakers are positioned behind the provided pillows, and once lying down, the viewer feels appropriately submersed in the sound. The vibrations of the Maori singing, turbines and other accompanying sounds lull me into a relaxing, almost trance-like state.


The videos appear almost narrative. I enter the space at a time when bubbles (which I had at first mistakenly identified as stars) are floating tranquilly across the screens, and this scene becomes ‘the beginning’ for me. Then the turbines start up, the grainy black and white image alluding to past times. The shape of the turbine whisking the bubbles into a fury of circular motion echoes the unusually shaped screen. The noise of the turbines, which, I should add, look eerily like eyes, is deafening (although when I left I realised that I’d stupidly positioned myself right behind the largest speakers).

Not quite in synch, one by one the screens switch to underwater scenes of waving reeds and submersed figures going about oddly everyday activities. To the sound of a spiritual wailing, a woman floats in a murky haze, hair lazily waving above her head as she tries to light a fire, a man with a spade digs amongst the reeds, and a boy and a girl, dressed neatly in shirts and carrying brown suitcases stare placidly at the viewer. The blurred image, the eerily calm figures, and soundtrack suggest memory or myth, and while the overall effect is quite tranquil, there is an underlying feeling of sadness and loss.

The underwater powerlines that come into view at ‘the end’ are the only built indicator of the town, Horahora, that was drowned and turned into Lake Karapiro. My flatmate, who grew up in a town on the North Island not far from the Lake, remembers waterskiing on Karapiro during school camps, and the way that she described the location reminded me strongly of Lake Jindabyne, the popular watersport playground that covers the similarly submerged old village. A new Jindabyne has sprung up on the shores of the dam created in the 1960s as part of the Snowy Mountains Scheme, yet it’s eyesore that in no way resembles the old drowned town (Apparently, when the dam levels are low you can spot the old church spire sticking defiantly out of the water). Similar comparisons can be made to Tasmania’s hydro electric scheme which has resulted in numerous artificial lakes being built throughout the island, so Aniwaniwa seems an appropriate work for a Tasmanian arts festival.

I unfortunately missed out on the forum on Friday at the Tasmanian School of Art, where the artists spoke about their work, although I usually prefer to look at a work before I hear about it anyway. The gallery guide at the Barn door didn’t seem to understand my preference however, and insisted on giving me a long spiel on the work before I’d even had a chance to enter.

Overall, Aniwaniwa is a stunning work. I stayed for two loops (of I think about 15 minutes each), engrossed the entire time, making it one of the few video/sound works that has managed to beat my very limited concentration capacity (others include a Bill Viola piece at the AGNSW last year and the sound piece at the Sydney Biennale. by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller).

Aniwaniwa is presented by Ten Days on the Island, Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery and Clarence City Council, 20 March -13 April, at Rosny Barn.

These images have been sourced from http://www.aniwaniwa.org/. Copyright belongs to the artists.

Callum Morton: Wall to Wall

I haven’t blogged for ages. I’ve been deliberating over a number of exhibitions but haven’t actually got round to writing them up properly, so I thought I’d bite the bullet and do a quick one on Callum Morton’s exhibition Wall to Wall at Roslyn Oxley9. Yes, I know it’s not in Hobart, but I was lucky enough to be in Sydney when the exhibition opened and I was blown away by the work.

For those unfamiliar with the Roslyn Oxley9 space, I’ll try to describe it because Morton’s work plays with the shape of the gallery. To enter the gallery, you walk up some stairs where at the top you are confronted with Morton’s first work, Monument #22: Black Hole Relocation (2009), a realistic-looking ‘brick wall’ made of “polyurethane, poxy resin, fibreglass, sand cement”, with a messy black circle painted in the centre. You then turn around, and opening off the small hallway/landing is the main gallery space.

Morton’s Monument #23: Slump (2009), also made of imitation bricks, is a sagging wall, which continues the line of the hallway into the main gallery, essentially cutting the space in half. It’s an unnerving sight: a life-size, seemingly heavy besser brick wall, held up merely by wooden supports and sandbags. Of course, it’s all an illusion, as the materials list indicates, but it still makes you slightly concerned as you walk the thin corridor between the white gallery wall and looming ‘besser bricks’, carefully stepping over the questionably adequate supports.



Morton’s wall falls short of the gallery length and the viewer is able to step around to the other side, the safer, cleaner side, and guessing from the painted surface, the outside. Here, the illusion continues. Painted in a trompe l'oeil style, we see that the geometric shapes are accompanied by shadows that, if you stand in the middle of the wall, emphases the illusion of a buckling wall. If you stand closer to the edge however, the shadows stop making so much sense. It’s disconcerting enough not to want to linger on this side of the wall, even though it’s plainly supposed to be the less ‘dangerous’ alternative.



I have something to admit. I love things that pretend to be other things. I remember the day that I discovered that the ‘metal’ (or chrome paint) on my mobile was peeling off. Was I upset? Not at all, I thought it was terrific. In 1860, Gottfried Semper described plastic’s predecessor, Indian Rubber, as ‘the factotum of the industry [which] lends itself to all purposes… since its nearly unlimited sphere of application is imitation,” and that was almost a century and a half ago. I like to think my mobile, camera, car and ipod, all of which sport a classy ‘metal’ finish, would please Semper.

I’m quite lucky in the visual arts to have so many examples of such illusionism to embrace. On my recent overseas trip I saw trompe l'oeils in the churches of Italy and France, and visited a Fischili and Weiss survey at the TATE Modern, where an entire room was made out of polystyrene objects so carefully shaped and painted that I at first walked through the room without realising they were imitative. Ricky Swallow also practices a similar kind of artmaking - the ‘hand-made ready-made’ as Justin Paton has described it. In short, you can probably understand the basis of my slightly biased enthusiasm for Morton’s plastic ‘bricks’. (Note: these last two paragraphs of rambling have been added after I was trying to work out why I used the words ‘blown away’ to describe an exhibition, and why I couldn’t come up with a more appropriate alternative)

An aspect of this exhibition that really interests me is that Roslyn Oxley9 is a commercial gallery and that Monument #23 work is priced at $120,000. I understand that private collectors are not the only clients of such galleries, and that public galleries frequently purchase work, but really, how is such a work to be handled, where would it be stored, and in the case of a private collector, where would it be placed? (“We’ll place it next to the dining table so that the guests don’t linger…”) I know this is not a new concept, I mean, installations are pretty much standard even in commercial galleries but I often wonder how viable such exhibitions are. Are they subsidised by other shows? Do many installations sell? If so, to whom? If anyone out there works for a commercial gallery, has an answer to these questions, or has ever wondered the same thing, please feel free to leave a comment.

Callum Morton’s Wall to Wall is on at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney 26 February – 21 March 2009

The copyright for all images belongs to Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery.