The glass house or diorama as a manufactured substitute of a given environment was a central point of departure in my practice. The hermetic enclosed ecologies found in natural history museums had their inception as 19th apparatuses of popular entertainment; the panorama, the diorama and pleorama were all alternate forms of spectacle making; in animating the tableaux vivant or still-scene to a level of dramaturgy and performativity, otherwise seen in theatre prosceniums. This sort of spectatorship appealed to the ‘image’ or ‘images’ as event -

In Tender Trophies, the glass house is installed contiguous to it’s referent ‘environment’, the university art school and its anomie of passing matter and material. The student, along with presenting their ‘showcase’ productions, is to prepare an incumbent array of provisional things, trials, errors, successes and misfires. There is a paradox at play here; in the uneasy correspondence between private and the publicized; subjecting accidental or impulsive record makings to eventual and ultimate academic scrutiny. An expectation of ‘evolution’ is upheld in the words, thoughts and annotations of studying arts and, as this manifests materially, in the near- constant production and expulsion of items and ephemera. I’ve attempted to arrest just some of this into a vitrine, spot-lighted, obsolete and idle.

This is a temporary compendium, a glossary of marginalia and floor sweepings born from ‘studio-visits’ and circumstantial hand-overs. All artists personally volunteered and selected their pieces on display, to be returned and repatriated at their request.

Including (alphabetically)
Andre Franco
Anna Klassen
Annie Song
Betsy Woolfall
Denise Honan
Jemima Lucas
Jennifer Choat
Lauren Huggins
Lia Dewey
Liv Moriarty
Steph Hosler
Yusi Zang
Yvette James
Hannah Meerman