Balancing The Act - Chloe Lane

The carefully balanced planks, on the carefully balanced logs, were freely balanced in such a way for very particular reasons: “propping” props? Although my calculated risk may have been conceptually viable, my installation (with its inherent risks) was thrown into question at the mention of a hammer-and-nails related compromise: conceptual responsibilities versus institutional expectations: balancing risk against security, compromise and function.

Kirsten Dryburgh's concrete ceiling wielded an impressive display of steel nuts, bolts and hooks that exerted a workshop authority and security as reminiscent of her industrious masterminding as her “looped” builder's string. Comparatively Jade Farley preferred to suspend her Perspex discs with nylon thread and “duck tape” with the rest of her installation ceremoniously smashed and scattered in heaps around the room. Thus sit the opposing dynamics of a determined security and a strategic flippancy.

Those artists relying on the accuracy of the floor-to-walls-to-ceiling relation in the Mondrian building were thrown a wildcard: the stories are true - the floor is not flat and the walls are not at right angles. Olivia Boyle's installation turned this to her favour when hinging her large wood and weave pin-board to the wall (a clever wall substitute and solution itself). With one wheel dangling a centimetre above the ground she supported it on a small wooden platform, drawing a connection to her own concrete wood-impressed platforms, and highlighting her attention to detailing the raw and its implicit pattern, colour and form: fixtures as more subtle tones of shade.

Fastened in place with a ball of Blutak under each leg Susie Pratt's miniature rotating sign summed up her considered casualness, as her documents freely collapsed and folded with the standing, folding and hanging tables they stood for. Her casualness so convincing that even the life-sized table securely fastened to the wall could fool one into believing the same Blutak or even the wind were its only adhesives.

Yes, my violently nailed together piece became a conceptual page-turn, not a down-fall; adhesives can be inspiring, even to those who refuse them. And Rachel O'Neill was not willing to question her conceptual faith for any sort of security: a black plastic bag filled with air balanced in a trash can, another suspended on a traffic cone, another balanced on a stick. Gravity and space were her only adhesives and her faith in these elements was imperative. For only through the objects' pure and unconfused relation to each other could they sing of the space they were in, the space they contained, and the space they dreamed of.

Right - Jade Farley 'Hanging Girls', 2004