Issue 24: Islands
Whether exotic or dangerous, romantic or political, islands conjure up diverse associations. They can be a place of refuge or a site of disorder and chaos. An island is in many ways its own world, a status that inevitably piques the interest of the adventurous.
It is perhaps the literary imagination that has been most in thrall of the island. Early examples include Homer’s depiction of Odysseus’ ten-year journey home to Ithaca via various island sites of both magic and terror. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels sends the protagonist on a series of journeys to various imaginary islands where he meets and interacts with curious societies that confound and enlighten him. Thomas More’s Utopia depicts a community that inhabits an isthmus which they physically detach from the mainland in order to form a progressive island society. In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Prospero’s island provides him with a refuge where he can rule and manipulate others with his sorcery.
The story that most famously expresses the exotic and adventurous qualities of the island is certainly Robinson Crusoe. In Daniel Defoe’s tale the hero finds himself shipwrecked on an unknown island where he is forced to fashion an existence out of limited supplies. His isolation encourages him to confront his own ideas of morality and religion. The influence of Crusoe’s adventurism and individualism extends throughout modern literary investigations. In H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau an island acts as an isolated laboratory where the doctor conducts his experiments in vivisection. William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies sets out a dystopian vision of power plays that illustrate the disparity between individual and common good. In his final novel Island, Aldous Huxley describes a utopian counterpoint to Brave New World, where drugs provide enlightenment rather than pacify, and trance states are used to assist learning, and not as a tool of indoctrination.
While perhaps less obvious as a theme for visual investigation, the island has been the focus of a series of recent exhibitions that have attempted to curate a contemporary vision of the island. The 2013 exhibition Inseldasein/Being an Island, held at the Daadgalerie in Berlin featured work by former artists-in-residece Fiona Tan, Allan Kaprow and Annika Eriksson, in order to explore how the city of West Berlin was effectively an island city surrounded on all sides by the German Democratic Republic. Tokyo Wonder Site’s exhibition Island View from early 2014 investigated why artists are fascinated by islands. The Dairy Art Centre’s 2013 exhibition Island comprised a large survey featuring work by Ai Weiwei, Thomas Demand and Laure Prouvost among many other high-profile contemporary artists whose work reflects the continuing fascination with the possibilities of the island.
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As residents of an island continent Australians have a complex relationship with their isolated homeland. In the last half century there has been a heightened theoretical and historical focus on the island status of Australia. When Manning Clark released his first volume of The History of Australia in 1962 it signalled that the nation was ready to begin addressing its heritage. In 1964 Donald Horne was commenting directly on Australia’s island mentality when he famously proclaimed that ‘Australia is a lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck’. While it was the first part of the expression that was to become a catchphrase for the optimistic post-war generation, many of the issues that Horne’s statement raised are still relevant today. Horne dismayed at the way isolation and a superfluity of mineral resources meant that Australians neglected to develop a culture of innovation and enterprise from which to prosper. Australia flourished because it is a lucky country, not because its people and government had worked hard to form a prosperous society. Isolation insulated Australians from dealing with many of the issues that other nations encountered. The luck that Australia seems to have been privileged with has always been tempered by the difficulties of its geographical location, which rendered it an isolated outpost of European culture. Geoffrey Blainey called this condition ‘the tyranny of distance’ while claiming that Australia’s geographical remoteness shaped the nation’s history and identity, as distance necessarily determined Australia’s relationship to the world beyond.
Despite the typical depiction of the Australian island mentality as irreverent and optimistic, its intellectuals have often despaired over what critic A.A. Phillips dubbed the ‘cultural cringe,’ and its effects on Australian identity. The cultural cringe, or a feeling of intellectual and cultural inferiority that is often evident in post-colonial societies, seems far less relevant today than it did 40 years ago when Terry Smith penned his influential essay ‘The Provincialism Problem’ outlining the dynamics of cultural imperialism in the art world. Smith asserted that the provincial artist is always destined to remain provincial. As the development of new technologies has increased the speed of travel and communication the situation has certainly changed. While the conditions that Smith describes of metropolitan centres as the capitals of art taste-making remain, it has diversified somewhat. No longer is New York the sole arbiter of trends in art, in fact we might now point towards a whole constellation of cities that form a map of the contemporary art world. Such cities act as islands of culture where practitioners connect and engage over common interests and causes.
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In issue #24 [ISLANDS] Runway presents of survey of contemporary Australian artists and writers who each present a vision of what an island might represent. Their works exist as evidence of the international and self-reflective attitudes of young Australians working in the creative fields. These investigations into the meaning of islands form five main strands: islands as literal geographic spaces; metaphoric islands; subjective experience as an analogy for an island; islands of the imaginary; and political islands.
The issues facing the island nation of the Maldives are explored by Laura McLean as she reports from the Contingent Movement Symposium, which outlined a vision for creating an archive for the country should it become uninhabitable due to global warming. A more lyrical reflection of an island nation is the focus of Alanna Lorenzon’s ruminations on her preconceptions of Iceland which were subsequently overturned during a residency in Reykjavik. The island as metaphor is visually explored in Yasmin Smith’s watercolours of a ‘palm island’ that appears in Australia’s outback, while Shannon Field examines the complex dark side of Australian masculinity under the influence of a degenerate past. Laura Skerlj constructs a detailed metaphor of the artist’s studio as an island, and David Greenhalgh examines the divergent histories of cinema and art while imaging a more unified future. The island acts as an allegory for subjectivity in Greer Rochford’s writing and art, where acts of travelling and discovery point to a heightened consciousness of the present moment. In Mode Intersit Express, Alexander Jackson Wyatt visually explores what Marc Augé termed ‘non-places’, the spaces we travel through between departure and destination, which by removing us from the routine of everyday life can lead to an intensified experience of subjectivity.
Lucinda Dayhew invites you into her domain as she trawls the online world for island associations in Pacific Island Life Record(ing)s. Isobel Parker Philip weaves a metaphoric travelogue by examining the cartographic qualities in Deb Mansfield’s artworks. Megan Robson examines Tanya Dyhin’s images produced on Kotlin Island which appear as illusions that materialize suspended somewhere between reality and fantasy. While Tim Woodward tells the story of a Philippe Parreno artwork that surfaces as an object of interest for an incongruously-assembled crew of travel companions who sail past it.
One of the most contentious issues in contemporary Australia, the refugee in detention who is transformed into a sort of political island. Sumugan Sivanesan’s imaginary friend Alex is in the unlucky position of being in detention in Bangkok. Sivanesan seeks to connect with Alex by encouraging his friends to send postcards to him sharing details of their quotidian experiences. The very real political implications of Australia’s island status are evoked in Kate Britton’s essay examining the issues arising out of Alex Seton’s work Someone died trying to have a life like mine, where a series of marble lifejackets suggest the grim consequences of maintaining an island fortress.
Islands can be many things to many people. We hope that Runway #24 [ISLANDS] sparks your adventurous spirit as you explore the individual worlds presented in each work.
Jasmine Powell is an artist and writer who currently resides in France. She holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts and a PhD, both from Sydney College of the Arts. Her thesis explained the connection between individualism and the artist throughout modernity, while also exploring how creativity can often be fuelled by subjective visions of the world. Jasmine also spent time studying at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris and at the Universität der Künste in Berlin.
Jasmine works with video, installation, sound and photography, and her work has been included in various exhibitions and screenings in Australia, the USA and Europe. Her work features numerous approaches including: the reworking of archive footage; a sort of amateur urban ethnography; and sculptural installation. In 2006 she acted as Director of Newspace Gallery, the former gallery of the SCA student union. From 2008-2012 Jasmine worked at the University of Western Sydney across various roles, including research, project management and tutoring. In 2013 Jasmine contributed two pedagogical articles to 72 Assignments: The Foundation Course in Art and Design Today, published by Paris College of Art Press.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.