Claire Conroy

Exhibition in Braidwood NSW

2011-08-19T08:04:00.000+08:00

Come along to The Altenberg in Braidwood to see my pinhole photographs from the lightspeed series. Opening friday night 19th August and closing 11 September.

Here is the clip that show the process of making these images.

Through Hell an High Water

2011-04-13T15:49:00.001+08:00

Welcome

Macrame Owl, created by Claire Conroy. 4m x 1m

Open Aviary - pin hole photograph by Claire Conroy. 1m x 1.2m

Through Hell and High Water

Thursday 21 April - Sunday 1 May

Through Hell and High Water is a group exhibition curated by Claire Conroy. The show is a survey of the tumultuous relationship between humans and nature. Through photography, installation, performance, video and sculpture, the artists reveal, send-up and observe how people coexist with the natural environment.

In a year already filled with natural disaster, this exhibition is a relational approach to human suffering, environmental protection, and coexistence in fragile ecosystems.

Exhibiting Artists: Claire Conroy, Emma Pressman, Huckleberry Robbings, Ben Schuman, Joaly Bird, Maddy Scarff.
Opening: Thursday 21 April, 5pm - 8pm
Address: Chrissie Cotter Gallery is located in Pidcock Street, Camperdown, next to the Camperdown Bowling Club.
When in use, gallery opening hours are Wednesday to Sunday, 11am-4pm. Entry is free and the gallery is wheelchair accessible.
It will be lovely to see you there.
I have some new sculpture and installation and some exciting new artists that I'm exhibiting with.
It will be a fun and interesting night that everyone is welcome to. Proceeds from the bar will be donated to the organisation Still Wild Still Threatened to continue to protect the southern Tasmanian Forests. www.stillwildstillthreatened.org
.....

The Collective Mind

2010-11-16T08:30:00.003+08:00

The Collective Mind

A sculpture made by In Stitches for the carriage works 2010. It is an incarnation of the evolving and ever changing crochet from The Sydney Reef. We will make it into a reef again but as we love the material so much that we will keep creating new things with it. The Collective Mind is a nod to all the contributors to the crochet and our collective creation.
contributors listed here .... http://sydneyreef.blogspot.com/2009/07/opening-announced.html

The Collective Mind

Cats and Ladders

2010-10-05T18:59:00.001+08:00

Title - 'Absorption'

Title - 'Infinite Bear.'

In this exhibition, I have created a series of images that explore superstitious beliefs about the soul being captured in portrait photography. I'm interested in the physicality of the light that has left the sitters body, which it is actually rendered in the emulsion of the image, if this holds traces of the person’s soul or not is perhaps superstitious or practical magic and is open to interpretation. Yet it is true that this photographic negative holds a direct connection to the light that touched the skin of the person you can see. In this seriesI have combined a number of black and white darkroom techniques that create a hand made, collaged effect that furthers the ‘one off ’ quality of these images, bending the images between positive negative, photograph and photogram. To create these images I hand made a pin hole camera from a 4m long x 2m high light proof tent.

CATS AND LADDERS

2010-09-07T21:45:00.001+08:00

COME ALONG... to my new exhibition at Alpha House Gallery - 226 Union St Erskineville NSW
Opening on the 22nd of September 6pm. - 26th gallery opened 10pm till 6pm daily...part of the Sydney Fringe Festival.

The Sydney Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef

2009-09-14T14:46:00.008+08:00

Claire Conroy co-facilitated the Sydney satellite of this global collaborative project as a member of

'In Stitches' collective.

The Sydney Reef brought together more than 360 creators over eleven months.

THE SYDNEY REEF is a Satellite of the worldwide Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef project created by Margaret and Christine Wertheim of the Institute for Figuring in Los Angeles.

Sydney Reef Poster - 2009 - Created by Charlotte Haywood.

Above: Network Image - Created by In Stitches collective.

detailing the interconnections of groups forming throughout the eleven moths of this collaborative project.

Installation - Ten attolls spanned over 25 meters in The Powerhouse Museum in August 2009. For more details of the Sydney project link to sydneyreef.blogspot.com
Photographs by Claire Conroy.

see theiff.org to find out more about the mathematics, marine biology and ecological issues underlying the Crochet Reef Project and to see the other Satellite Reefs growing around the world.

UFO

2007-12-23T01:02:00.002+08:00

Claire’s video titled UFO is being exhibited at Penrith Regional Gallery (see details in image below). The work shows a strange and ephemeral sculpture being released into the night sky. People witnessed the event by randomly passing by and some travelled to find the source of these unidentifiable lights. The performers/participants in the event were creating communication havoc with the skies by way of making UFO’s.

2007-12-23T01:00:00.000+08:00

2007-08-23T02:14:00.001+08:00

UFO - Mark releasing the flying object

This series of still images and the video created of this work are being exhibited in a show called 'The Visitors' showing at Penrith Regional Gallery from the 8th December 2007 - 28th January 2008.

UFO was a series of playful experiments with floating sculpture and interventions in public space.

This series was created one evening in a park in Glebe in Sydney. A crew of about 10 friends banded together to set these crude lantern-esque sculptures into the air.

Lightspeed.

2007-08-23T02:07:00.005+08:00

nepean river pinhole photograph 1m x 2.5m

Lighthorse Exchange - Pinhole Photograph 1m x 2.5m

The Lightspeed project was created using a three tonne truck and transforming it into a pinhole camera. The 'Camera' was then driven accross Sydney over seven days stopping to expose one image per day.

The following is an essay writtern about the project in 2007.

Lightspeed: a journey across Sydney in a pin-hole camera. Article by Zanny Begg

"The biggest piece of domestic machinery, which is an extension of our homes and our own private space, is the motorcar. When people drive they have the possibility of death at their own fingertips. And then, people are aware of a whole range of emotions that can't express when they're in their office, dealing with other people, that they can express alone in a car. You can't swear at your secretary for making a spelling mistake but you can swear at another driver behind your windshield" JG Ballard.

Lightspeed: a journey across Sydney in a pin-hole camera is an ambitious solo exhibition by Claire Conroy which opens at Mori Gallery on November 8. Conroy has transformed a 2 tonne truck into a pin-hole camera and taken a road trip across Sydney from Berry Island reserve in Sydney Harbour west towards the Blue Mountains. With a small hole drilled in the side of the truck Conroy stopped at various points along the way using the power of natural sunlight to document her journey. The results are a virtuoso series of 2 - 3 meter photographic paper negative prints of the view from the road - toll gates, motorways, bridges, roads, car parks and roadside scenery.

While the truck-stop has been a recurring source of artistic inspiration, perhaps most memorably captured in Ed Ruscha's photographs of gas stations from California to Oklahoma, Conroy's use of the pin-hole camera allows the viewer to return to the roadside image in a startlingly new way. The long exposure times - Conroy spent hours holed up inside an often sweltering truck waiting for the image to expose - has the curious affect of capturing the solid infrastructure of the road whilst deleting the moving elements of the cars. This coupled with the negative quality of pinhole prints makes Conroy's images extremely dark, brooding and ominous. The black skies, ghostly white trees, and completely empty roads imbues Lightspeed with a post-apocalyptic feeling of life after the crash of civilisation.

Conroy explains that one of her inspirations for this work was David Cronenburg's film adaptation of the 1973 novel by JG Ballard Crash. Ballard's controversial book uses the metaphor of the car crash to explore aspects of contemporary phycology. It tells the story, through the author's own voice, of a man who, after surviving a car crash, gets involved with a group of people sexually obsessed with celebrity, death and car crashes.

At a crucial moment in the film one of the characters tell the hero "that's the future Ballard and your already part of it, there is a benevolent psycho-pathology that beckons towards us.. the car crash [is a] fertilising rather than destructive event." Conroy pursues this metaphor in her work by opening it up to a new layer of meaning. What if the crash were not the specific experience of tragedy on the motorway, fuelled by psycho-sexual addiction to cars, but the crash of motorway culture itself?

In each of Conroy's prints she carefully counter poses organic and natural elements alongside the empty infrastructure of roads. These subtle and gentle juxtapositions remind the viewer of the environmental consequences of a society obsessed with cars. As Conroy explains "in using an old mode of photography such as pin hole photography I have attempted to in some way slow the world down." Conroy's work thus situates the viewer between the autopia and the autogeddon, a strange world where the structure of the landscape if dominated by the car and yet the car itself has all but vanished from the picture.

Of course this exit is not entirely complete. Central to Conroy's work is the understanding that the images you are looking at were taken through the medium of a truck, which was driven west out of Sydney on the motorway. And attached to several images are a series of soundscapes composed by Kelly Sturgiss (Flat Products Division), Naomi Radom (Coda), Jarrah Kidd (BumbleBeez81), Kate Carr, Toni Buck (The Necks), David Haines and Joyce Hinterding (Sun Valley), Giovanna Picoi (The Lunettes) and Sam Johnson (Swing and Tasty Bag). Each of these artists has worked with found sound at the sites of the photographic exposures, incorporating the hum of the road into a sound piece which matches the time Conroy took to expose each image .

Truck / Pinhole Camera

Iaska

2007-06-02T23:23:00.003+08:00

Photograph with applied salt texture:
Salmon Gums Western Australia 1m x1m
copyright claire conroy 2007

This image is one in a series of nine pinhole photographs taken in the wheat belt of Western Australia during a residency at International Art space Kellerberrin Australia. The research informing these photographs came from three months of consulting with farmers and CSIRO scientists about land salinity in the area.

Link to more about the project. www.iaska.com.au

Iaska

2007-05-25T23:43:00.003+08:00

Shooting photographs with water tank pinhole camera in salt lake Kellererberrin Western Australia.

Pinhole camera made from watertank and makeshift exposure testing box.

Iaska

2007-05-12T23:17:00.004+08:00

This image is from a series of work from Kellerberrin district school

Here is a pinhole photograph from Campbell who is in year 6.

cute

Iaska

2007-04-25T12:03:00.002+08:00

Rain in Keller

Kellerberrin is a dry area of the country and rain is a welcome thing for farmers. As it is in much of Australia. Farmers are sowing their crops. It seems in the past farmers have waited until the first rain before they would sow. Over the past few years some farmers have begun to sowing before the rain as they cant rely on the rain coming in time.

But today there was rain.

Strangly enough rain is not always a good thing.

On one hand it is wanted and needed yet on the other hand, it contributes greatly to soil salinity.

This area was heavily cleared of trees 100 years ago. As a consequence of this clearing the landscape has been changed dramatically. It has become extremely salty, (see the image in the first blog entry.) Because the trees have been removed there are little to no deep roots left in the soil. The roots of the trees, held water in the soil profile, the roots also used 'ground water' that is deep below the soil surface. With no roots using and storing water, it is rising to the surface. When it does the water gets evaporated and the salt gets left behind.

And there it is.. a Salty landscape that nothing wants to grow in and no one wants to drink .... 'The Rise of the White Death' is the term I like the best.

2 million hectares are affected by salinity in WA. 5.7 million Australia wide.

There is no doubt that land clearing is the problem.

Land clearing is still continuing in Australia. It seems some people just cant get enough, send them a bag of salt today. salt for breakfast lunch and dinner, delicious.

Back to Kellerberrin where there are nearly no trees to clear, that job has already been done. So as the rain falls today the seeds that have been sown during the week will be loving it. The rest of the rain water, with its small traces of salt will be heading down to meet the water table and dragging the white death up with it on its return.

The problem with wheat and other annual crops is firstly it has shallow roots that doesn't lock enough water into the soil. It doesn't use any water from the water table. Secondly after harvest, during summer there is no wheat to absorb any water at all. The soil is left, naked, exposed.

Shallow

With all the talk of dryland salinity, it is not hard to see that it is one of the most far reaching and pressing environmental issues in Australia. It so cruelly describes the problem of land clearing and consequences of altering the landscape on such a large scale.

Many plans are in place and strategies are being explored to keep the salt in check. I'm discovering many different approaches and opinions.

Replanting trees is the best solution, making this practical is challenging.

Iaska

2007-04-22T21:59:00.002+08:00

From the tip and back.

Rubbish in its Habitat.

Male Shade Cloth in its Burrow

A White Bodied Pillow, grazing on native shrub

A Female Twisted String

some discoveries in the behaviour of rubbish
it multiples and spreads rapidly.

Iaska

2007-04-16T19:20:00.002+08:00

me and you....

the sunsets into the bonnet

Iaska

2007-04-13T17:23:00.003+08:00

salt crust...yes its really true ...this was soil.

This is the first of my news from Kellerberrin WA

Ive started an 8 week residency at IASKA, which is an inspirational gallery/concept that is getting contemporary artists from all over the world to come to rural Australia.

http://www.iaska.com.au/

I'm here to be a part of a program called Habitats