22–30 November 2019
Mon-Fri: 10am – 5pm
Saturday: 12–5pm
Monash University
Art Design & Architecture
900 Dandenong Road
Caulfield East, Victoria
Geraldine Smith
Geraldine Smith
The handmade sugar sculptures tell the tale of the bitter sweet truth behind sugar. Sugar the world’s third most valuable crop. The work explores fragility and the question of human value verses the needs of the colonialist. Slavery and sugar remained tied for a very long time. The work looks at the relationship between slavery and the production of sugar through exploitation of labour and how indigenous people were taken by force into slavery and displaced from their land. Sometimes slavery was through the coercion of people through trickery and kidnapping to work as labourers in the sugar plantations also known as Blackbirding.
Geraldine Smith
The work investigates the relationship between human induced climate change and its effect on the environment. One of the consequences of climate change for example, in Australia, bushfire is intensifying, starting earlier and lasting longer. The fabric tries to capture the abstract nature of extreme heat and dryness and its effect on the landscape.