The 2001 Anne & Gordon Samstag
International Visual Arts Scholarships
| Fassih Keiso | Linda Marrinon | Archie Moore | Rea | John Spiteri | Paul White |
Artist: ANNE KAY
Pocket Mountains 1999
Sculpee III modelling clay
6 x 30 x 100 cm
© the artist
Picture Tree 1998
installation of wall bracket, infra-red motion
Sensor and Hanimette projection on plastic bags
variable dimensions
© the artist
The art practice of Anne Kay is diverse and utilises a variety of means in response to different situations. Her materials are usually humble: often found, discarded objects unprepossessing in themselves, and the low-end technology of the slide projector. The conceptual processing which renders them art, is akin to the alchemist's secret of turning base metal into gold.
Invited to participate in Oblique - a site-specific art project based in the small town of Otira in the South Island of New Zealand, she took some Sculpee III modelling clay with her. Her Pocket Mountains were a response to the landscape encircling the town. Placed on an available car roof they marry with the ubiquitous tourist brochure image of the mirror-lake.
The urban environment is Kay's usual habitat and its issues her subject. After reading an evocative description from the early 1820s of a journey along Paramatta Road, now one of Sydney's most congested and 'dirty' thoroughfares then edged by a Turpentine Ironbark forest, Kay went in search of remnant bush preserved in a suburban parkland. In Picture Tree the image of a Blackbutt Gum, one of the trees she documented, appears on the screen of a plastic bag (now the endemic species of the area) as a luminous memory.
Making-do and allowing for happenstance, Kay's work is provisional by nature; its heroic/pathetic attitude (big themes/modest means) is what packs the punch.
Robyn McKenzie
From her Samstag catalogue essay
Art and Research
| Anne Kay Born 1958, Nasau, Bahamas |
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| 2001 | Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship MFA, California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles, USA |
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| 1999 | Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours), University of Western Sydney - Nepean, Sydney | |
| 1994 | Bachelor of Visual Arts, Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney |
| Fassih Keiso | Linda Marrinon | Archie Moore | Rea | John Spiteri | Paul White |