I am on Hamilton Island which is quite nice
There is a sculpture shop down at the marina. It's called Foot's Art. This is what it looks like from across the street.
There's a whole lot of Foot's sculptures plopped around on the nature strip outside, many with a sea creatures theme eg seals, dolphins, walruses, whales etc, but I was drawn to the ones that had something to say about the human body. I can tell you, in the past five days here I have seen more human bodies, specifically more exposed parts of them, than I can cope with. I'm not sure that these are really my people. I'm here so I must be one of them I guess???????????? ???? ?? Maybe everyone here is also an overeducated cultural sector worker wondering why he or she feels (ahem) like a fish out of water but at the same time could get very used wearing bathers all day and drinking 2 pm margheritas out of coconuts at the intra-pool bar. But they are all just so fit, even the obviously very unfit ones. There are fewer tattoos than in Melbourne, and not one single beard, if you can believe it, but also there are far, far more white men with baseball caps on backwards singing Counting Crows songs into mics whilst accompanying themselves on acoustic guitar. It is not safe to venture out at certain times of the day without prophylactic headphones in position. Perhaps Foot is working through articulating something about all of that. I haven't come across a single marine mammal while I've been here that's for sure.
The first time I saw the sculptures it was dusk (Qld non-daylight saving time, thus disorientingly early) and the shop itself was closed, so I went back the next day and then I was able to establish that they are made of marble dust and resin, just like the composite stone benchtops in the slick holiday houses perched along the island's high ridge roads. I was extremely sceptical that Foot ever sells any of these things (the bigger ones have six-figure price tags) but then on Thursday morning I was playing mini-golf with Lenny and I happened to look up the hill and I actually saw a humungous sculpture, unmistakably Footian, being forklifted out of a van and driven up a winding, gated driveway.
I'm not going to offer a commentary on these, because really, why bother? You already know exactly what I'd say.
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| I admit I am kind of taken with this one - the enormous uncle-hand doing "I've got your nose" |
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| YOOOOOOGGGGGAAAAA |
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| This one is called "Fantasy" |
This is the very greatest of all and is clearly the work into which Foot has poured all of her/his innermost feelings and thoughts on humanity, art, life, the body and the soul; I'm sorry that I don't know its name. The man is chiselling himself out of a block of benchtop and also there is an alien clinging to his back. The alien grasps a tool of some kind and it appears that the tool has just been used to push a hole into the benchtop chunk in the general region of the man's left thigh, if not quite straight in to where it should be.
One side of the base bears the following inscription:
"You shall know the TRUTH and the TRUTH shall make you FREE"
if you are not in the mood for the truth or for being made free you may walk around the other side and behold this:
"Only
if
you
want to be"
(signed with a pictogram foot, like half a Hang Ten logo)
Inspired by Foot, and as a lasting souvenir of this never-to-be-repeated holiday adventure, I attempted a self-portrait thats looks like I'm about to have my skull trepanned by a nude, bleached, oiled, shrunken Tommy Wiseau.
I know you will appreciate the intention even if the result is less than perfect. xx
1 comment:
*Stops in tracks in 40 C heat*
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