barbara campbell 2015

I assisted Sydney artist Barbara Campbell in the production of a major new work titled ‘Well there you are’, part of a larger installation and series of works planned through 2016.

‘Well there you are’ is a series of videos created by overlaying individual documentary video sequences of Barbara gradually creating large charcoal drawings by sequentially drawing each projected frame of short sequences of video she shot during a stint assisting migratory bird researchers in remote north-western Australia during the bird flocks’ annual departure from Australia to the northern hemisphere.

The resulting silent video is displayed in the gallery space adjacent to the resultant drawings. As visitors walk in the space, they trigger fragments of vocial audio derived directly from the same video sequences that were used to make the drawings – the uttered phrases of an elderly volunteer bird lover watching the flocks depart – ‘Well there you are…”; “Wonderful’; ’You won’t get much better than that!’; etc

gary warner 2014