The initial impetus for this project began during a Critical Path workshop in June 2009 that Paul was facilitating on The Body In Architecture and Space, where Rosie was participant. Following this they began an informal dialogue about emotional and psychological narratives implied within architecture - how a place makes you feel and act and how it produces other behaviours and relations. This dialogue was also present in a new work that Paul and Jeff were starting and it became apparent that a working relationship between the three to investigate these themes in a more cultural setting would be an interesting coming together of minds.
Rosie’s work has a strong connection with performing the everyday and examining social and cultural orthodoxies. The last 2 works she has made (No Entry and Fraudulent Behaviour) have had a key fascination with space (internal and external, psychological and personal) and how it affects the way we live. Jeff and Paul are a newly founded working partnership since 2007, whose current project, OVERLAY takes as its starting point the notion that as individuals much of what we are seen to be is a construct of falsified histories and corrupted memories. Utopian ideals of oneself brought on by either the need or desire to conform. Underlying this sentiment is a comment to the notion of the immigrant and the assimilation of the self within a community.
Connecting these three artists is their desire to explicitly create work in a discursive setting, where the intent is to expose, produce and encourage new sets of relations and to open this up to the community.
This residency period is one about research and information gathering. Formulating working ideas on what defines private and public actions and spaces of intimacy and testing out a number of scenarios for development around greater western Sydney.
