Artist Statement

The angle of incidence is the angle formed between an incoming ray of light and a line that is perpendicular to the surface it strikes (the normal. This angle is important in understanding how light reflects off surfaces, and rules such as angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence.

INSTALLATION PLAN & CONTENT LEGEND

1_THE CONVERSATON (VISION IN THE CLOUDS) Metal clad doors 2040x820mm; magnets; aviation machinist components and debris ex. USA; photographs VISION IN THE CLOUDS / ONE MILLION SLAB BLOCKS AND COUNTING 2014 30x30cm metallic prints; UTNTITLED digital print, 700x700mm; IMPOSSIBLE KITES AND DREAMS ply maquette and cord, 1200x110x100mm; digital print, cumulus cloud and fire cloud; WEATHER SOCK video loop 2022.

New York from above, taken from helicopter 2010 with 35mm film, using portrait lens; Afire, and a cumulus cloud, taken from jet, flying to Hobart for a lecture on the Antarctic. A meditation on materiality of metal clouds, material reflections, emergences, and memory.

2_DOPPLGANGER (AVIATOR) DON FAIRBANK 1940’s; Vortex drawings. Digital prints; of a grandfather in aviation uniform, noting the weight of the parachute worn. The grandfather I never met and only knew as mythological DC-3 pilot in the 1940’s, turns out to be the figure of the aviator via my father channelling and trips to Moorabbin airport as a child. Drawings follow the reline but intuitively outline vortextual sense; Red prints - Cerberus black clay maquette for a Greek WWI linked “gates of hell” monument to swimming through Black Rock’s Half Moon Bay scuttled breakwater; digital print, UNTITLED, surreal helmet archaeologies figuring.

VOID GLOBAL, video loop: cabin roar and clouds; data clouds and silence of abstraction; tracking flight paths accumulated during a corporate life: One World Alliance ideals vs a culminating account of carbon credits deficit.

3_THE BLUE Object - NEW BABYLON, timber offcuts, paint stack, 30mmx700mm; Images - PORTRAIT OF INDUSTRY digital print; WHEN NL WNET VERTICAL digital scan off Ektachrome slide taken 2001.

Metals and machining is part of my making experience; the jigsaw through to fabrication and casting collaborations; natural resonances, noisy processes, a marked contrast behind the silence of image stills. Across the work is a metals affinity, cobalt included (responsible for the blue); the verticality implies ascension - the buildings were then Netherlands first “tall towers”, with clouds grids, and aviation’s sky’s the limit moment. It seems the work here draws from the blackness of the void years later, and a Netherlands now capping aviation growth vs the US-AU unlimited growth programming.

4_LANGUAGE OF INDUSTRY STACK Timber cabinet, painted, with castors and aluminium sheet; machinist blocks stack. Machinist materials to me are the new “flint” archaeologies/ industry is art.

1_CABINET (endless loops and contradictions) Aluminium, acrylic, timber trestles 4040x820x1300mm Five bays, range of current and past works and references used to develop material, spatial and systems thinking projects; of events, global change; moving through archaeologies, resources, to ephemeral environmental situations and cartographic accounts of personal experiences – the things that led to the air and a grandfather pilot ghost. Starts at chapter iii, because there is no beginning or end, but folding.

iii. AIRSPACE 2018 ongoing. Of the air in terms of aviation and space, territory, law, belonging to an autonomous global industry, toward understanding post WWII aviation state of mind, new materiality and geo-poetics. Abstracting the air and separating from publics and sensuous experience, but with aviation also comes brute force physics that the redline deals with as noise.

iv. RED LINE 2016. A political revisioning of global-local escalating aviation events involving helicopters to jets in Melbourne, mapping conditions and lobbying government for reform, a volunteer project advocating for communities that began in 2018.

v. VOID GLOBAL 2016, archaeologies, Greek culture, techne and the bronze age, the monster class CERBERUS, mapping a personal cosmology, a flight cartography, global expansion, policy and poetics. The constellated geometries extracted set up new forms such as the bronze tectonic VOID exhibited with the scale figure.

vi. THE IDLING EXECUTIVE (continuous play) “Non-toxic” re-chromed lego, machinist metal gauge blocks. Of recovery of play, modernism - space comms; Ghost Ship architectures stage set test for a collaboration with a Baroque Musician Mauricio Carasco on the Southern Argentinian Chiloe ghost ship mythology CALAEUCHE (Flying Dutchman), with its emerging/disappearing floating mirror effects; New York’s Mr and Mrs Rockefeller (from NYC One Million Slab Blocks and Counting).

vii. TIME’S ARROW 2017 metal machinist case “M. SINCLAIR”, patinated white bronze, plaster casts, machinist’s micro measure and miniature maquette. The largest icebergs ever recorded series began in experiencing hurricanes Irene and Sandy when living in New York. The loss of loved ship HMS Bounty and its captain, whom the US coast guard couldn’t save, led to researching flows - family legacies are too embedded in Baffin Bay ice flows and another 15,000 lost ships. VOID GLOBAL data base resourcing sets up this “mementos of loss” / travellers of the Anthropocene series, also destined for the natural history and sciences museum (a nod to the past state museum in Melbourne). Pertinent now as the USA has just announced tracking ice data shall cease, affecting science data centres including the ESA and the Danish scientist research upon which this project depends.

END.

Artist Biography

Anna Fairbank (b. 1966) is an artist and architect, working at the intersection of art, architecture and environment, using found objects, industrial materials, photography, cartography and digital processes, informed by archaeology, philosophy and poetry to inform speculative image-object assemblies concerning modernity and state of environment. Past corporate practice and organisational theory intersects recent engagements in the culture of technology and materialities such as consequences unlimited growth in industries such as aviation. Invitation to participate in Venice Biennale formalised the arts agenda, as speaker and workshop panellist for a USA convened Session Displace/ Disrupt under the 2016 Venice Biennale curator headline Reporting from the Front - the theme of The Shareholder and ship wreck allegory redraws the future of practice, and subsequent role as curatorial director for Hayball Architects, Exchange, for the European Cultural Centre’s Time Space Existence exhibition, Venice Biennale, 2018. In 2022 she was awarded Australian institute at Athens Creative Contemporary Arts Residency, courtesy University of Sydney to extend research on legacies research, museology, the contemporary city concept of reciprocity, and realise Cerberus/Kεrveros a monument work in black clay, responding to psychospatial past-present Australia-Greek connections made in WWI and mythologies. At the city scale, Architeam Unbuilt Prize 2022 M1 The Deck: Infrastructural Open Air Museum Park focusses on freeway conversions redressing modernism, which formed in volunteering to survey aviation growth and global policy affecting communities, resulting in the inception of a, The Office of the Air, an ongoing manifesto work beyond discipline norms. Currently she is undertaking PhD studies at RMIT, and relaxes by fabricating objects, and spending time outdoors.