Carly Fischer's sculptural installations explore some of the complexities and contradictions involved in contemporary notions of place and cultural identity. Adopting an ethnographic process of collecting objects, stories, stereotypes and mythologies from place to place, her installations weave found and fabricated fragments into alternate narratives that suggest a more ambiguous contemporary context. In her installations, a souvenir, an artefact, an advertisement, a song or a piece of roadside trash becomes a point of departure for investigating the broader context that surrounds it.
‘From Little Things Big Things Grow’ is a sculptural installation that reflects on how contemporary drives towards a more cultural, environmental and political awareness in Australia have been used by corporations to market their products. Drawing on the famous protest song by Paul Kelly, the installation asks whether such cultural resistance can escape being appropriated, commodified and sold back to us as gentrified lifestyle packages. In the installation, these products and the cultural objects they reference are reassembled, remixed and reconstructed as strange hybrid sculptural propositions. Shape-shifting between home furnishings, totems, makeshift armatures and props, the sculptures reflect on the complex and often contradictory repurposing of cultural resistance in a contemporary Australian context.
Image:
From the series From Little Things Big Things Grow 2017
Found wooden objects, Pine, Tasmanian Oak, Jelutong, MDF, adhesives, acrylic paint and varnishes
60 x 60 x 170cm Courtesy of the artist