Air

Rosslynd Piggott Born 1958, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia Lives and works in Melbourne I was amazed to witness an audience completely engaging with these tiny spaces of the apparently invisible, labelled with the specifics of site and date, as the only markers for their imagined projections . . . Perhaps I had performed a spell, or some kind of seduction, as people gazed into the collected air to see an abundance of gathered memories. Rosslynd Piggott 1 Rosslynd Piggott has found many ways to explore and amplify the intangible over the course of her artistic career. Piggott’s sculptural installation Collection of air 2.12.1992 - 28.2.1993 1992–93 1992–93 creates a diary from air and offers homage to Marcel Duchamp’s 50 cc of Paris Air 1919. During her travels from Melbourne to destinations throughout Europe, Piggott established a daily routine of capturing and labelling samples of air. ‘The collection was corked and slipped into my pocket to be wax-sealed at the end of the day, embossed with “R”, my initial and in French the sound for “air”’, she says. 2 Together, the samples trace the artist’s passage through Italy and France, visiting friends and viewing significant artworks, indicated by labels such as: ‘Air near Rodin’s Gates of Hell’; ‘Air near Piero della Francesca’s Legend of the True Cross, Arezzo’; as well as the more abstract ‘Air of Paris’. The work presents the air of 65 different moments, preserved with care. The walls of each glass vial separate their still and precious cargo from the buffering air of the cabinet in which they sit, and from the dynamic ever- changing air we breathe today. 1 Rosslynd Piggott, Garden Fracture / Mirror in Vapour Part 1 [exhibition catalogue], Veniceinabottle, Venice, 2016. 2 Piggott. (above and opposite) Rosslynd Piggott / Collection of air 2.12.1992 - 28.2.1993 1992–93 1992–93 115 114 Shared Shared