Still gleaning for plastics, on the beach

Rox De Luca

14-30 August 2020

Images by Ian Hobbs Media

This project is supported by funding from the Inner West Council

Clearway (Corona) to be streamed online 27- 28 August.

Rox De Luca's Still gleaning for plastics, on the beach is open until Sunday 30 August, Fri - Sun 11am-5pm.

CLEARWAY (Corona) is currently being filmed by Clare Hawley and directed by Lliane Clarke for Voices of Women amongst Rox De Luca's Still gleaning for plastics, on the beach. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, it is being filmed at times when it is not open to the public, and once made, CLEARWAY (Corona) will be released online for a limited time only. 

To watch the film you need to register for the link on https://events.humanitix.com/clearway-corona. There is a Pay What you Can option and a free option to register. The film will be released for 24 hours starting on two dates only.

Filming CLEARWAY (Corona) Sunday 16 August

Filming CLEARWAY (Corona) Sunday 16 August

CLEARWAY (Corona) films actors reading short monologues and stories, in conjunction with music by Elizabeth Jigalin composed for prepared piano in response to Rox De Luca’s work and including two solo musicians, flautist Jessica Scott and cellos Freya Schack-Arnott. 

On composing music to accompany Rox De Luca’s work …

To accompany Rox De Luca’s work, I have composed three prepared piano pieces – each of which have contrasting characters. 

During a visit to Rox’s studio, I was particularly drawn to the colourful, intricate, playful and melancholic nature of her work – qualities that I often explore in my music.  Additionally, Rox’s process of finding, sorting and assembling this material reminded me of my approach to preparing a piano (ie: placing objects into a piano in order to change the sound).

When preparing a piano, I will often explore a combination of found materials that I experiment with in terms of their placement within the piano – extending the palette of sounds I have to work with.

In ‘sculpting’ these three prepared piano pieces, I was able to fill my piano with plastic materials Rox had given me from her own collection – adding a curious dimension/connection between the music and visuals.

On composing two monologues for two solo musicians …

As a transition between the footage of short stories read by actors and Rox De Luca’s artwork, I have composed two ‘monologues’ – one for flutist Jessica Scott and the other for cellist Freya Schack-Arnott.

In composing these two miniatures, I have been drawing upon textual features of the stories (overall structure, themes, titles and phrases) in synthesis with ideas that have been inspired by Rox’s works and the Articulate project space itself.

The musicians will be filmed playing their monologue alongside Rox’s work – as if a duet. I love composing miniatures especially for solo instruments as it  is an opportunity to focus on an idea whilst working in dialogue with the musician who will be bringing the music to life.

Like the stories shared by ‘solo’ actors, there is something beautifully personal about music composed for solo musicians and I am looking forward to experiencing this parallel within the film.

Elizabeth Jigalin, 2020. 

Read more about Elizabeth Jigalin here.

The Voices of Women project is supported by funding from the Inner West Council

Rox De Luca, Still gleaning for plastics, on the beach

Open Fri-Sun 11am-5pm 14 - 30 August

(except Sunday 16 August)

Open day  Friday 14 August from 11am to 5pm 
(see conditions of entry below)

Voices of Women presents Still gleaning for plastics, on the beach, an installation by Rox De Luca, showing work made from materials she has gleaned from the beach near where she lives.

Still gleaning for plastics, on the beach is also the location in which Clearway (Corona) will be filmed. This is a short Voices of Women film in which Australian women’s stories are performed in conjunction with the installation and with the music written in response to it by composer Elizabeth Jigalin.

Due to Covid-19 restrictions, the film Clearway (Corona) will ONLY be streamed online on Thursday 27 August or Friday 28 August. 

For tickets register here: https://voiceswomen.com/ 

Rox De Luca Still gleaning for plastics, on the beach (detail), Ph Margaret Roberts

Rox De Luca Still gleaning for plastics, on the beach (detail), photo Sue Callanan

Rose Bay Beach shoreline Photo credit Rox De Luca

Rox gleaning on Bondi Beach. Photo credit Alana Dimou

Rox gleaning on Bondi Beach. Photo credit Alana Dimou

Rox De Luca: Gleaning for plastics, defying wastefulness

Most days Sydney-based artist Rox De Luca gleans along her local beach, Bondi, or a little further away at Rose Bay Beach. She is looking for flashes of colour and of whiteness against the sand, the signs that the beach—like every beach on the planet—is adjusting fragment by fragment to the deluge of plastic waste that our species generates daily. She collects the weather-worn fragments from the sand, and she takes them home to clean and to categorize by size, colour and shape. Then her defiant transformations occur.

Using steel wire or fishing line she threads the plastic remnants into long sinuous garlands, or she collates them into smaller, intimate bundles. Sometimes De Luca accesses her plastics from other sources—for example, the tamper-proof aviation seals that are discarded in their hundreds of thousands each day in airports across the world—and reorders them into shapes like the skeletons of deceased sea creatures, an allusion to the lethal work done by plastics when ingested by the marine animal and bird life of the earth’s oceanic ecosystems. At times, De Luca homes in on a recognizable plastic form that seems to proliferate without pause, a key example being the red tops from the small fish-shaped plastic soy sauce bottles that are ubiquitous in Japanese restaurants. That De Luca can create massive spirals out of those small, but endlessly available, discards, says a lot about the poor design choices that food producers have made, and that we as customers accept without question.

I use the verb “to glean” to frame De Luca’s aesthetic interest in the environmental spate of discarded plastic in two senses: to gather something laboriously and slowly; and to detect, discover, unearth, often little by little, ergo to deduce, to infer, also slowly. Usually applied to the actions of people collecting remnant grains or vegetables or fruits after harvesting, De Luca’s gleaning involves her gathering of plastic detritus, and her remaking of those plastic shards and discards into new forms, and thus new modes of critical deduction and inference.

The constructions evolving from De Luca’s gleaning are beautiful in their sinuousness and their subtle, at times translucent, colourations. Even the minimal, neat order of her small bundles invites admiration precisely because the environment appears to be assisting De Luca in configuring that order. At the same time De Luca’s works are humbling in their defiant reminder of our destructive, wasteful propensities.

A January 2016 World Economic Forum report forecasts that in the middle of this century our oceans will hold less fish than plastics. And—as De Luca’s gleaning intimates—plastics are vying with sand itself to form the core constituent of the planet’s beaches. De Luca’s practice addresses such forecasts by asking her audience to intuit something of these global displacements, and the vastness of their scale, when viewing the reformulated results of her gleaning for plastic, on the beach. It seems apposite, then, that this exhibition takes place in the middle of a global pandemic that has caused many of us to reflect on our relations with, and impacts on, the world that hosts us.

© Paul Allatson, University of Technology Sydney, 2020

https://voiceswomen.com

Conditions of entry to the exhibition:

There are limited places inside Articulate. You may have to wait a few minutes if it is full when you arrive.

Please stay at home if you’re unwell.
Stay at home if you’ve been in contact with a known or suspected COVID-19 case.
Please wear a mask/face covering when inside Articulate.
Utilise hand sanitisers provided at the Articulate entrance.
Leave your contact tracing information on entry.
Maintain 1.5 metres distance from other visitors and staff.
Have your forehead temperature taken with touchless temperature gun on entry to Articulate.

The Voices of Women project is supported by funding from the Inner West Council

John Gillies: Proposal for a Performance Space

Final performance

Photos: Colour: Marta Ferracin; black and white: Christopher Verheyden