The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

JOAN GROUNDS - MATERIAL AND METONYMY Between 1967 and 1970 Joan Grounds made a series of burnings, first in Ghana and then on deserted beaches on the south coast of New South Wales in Australia. Tall and vaguely anthropomorphic, her papier-mache sculptures quickly flamed and crumpled into ash, leaving only the record of their passing on Super 8 film shot by the artist. The burnings were directly inspired by dreadful television and press images of Vietnamese monks self-immolating, in protest against the American participation in the war in Vietnam. Thirty-five years later, these films provide a key to Joan Grounds's art. 1 Joan Grounds was born in the United States and, like many of her compatriots, she could not accept the consequences of American military policy in South-East Asia. Contemporary press coverage of the war was, albeit at a distance, Grounds's first encounter with Asian society and culture . It was to exert a defining influence on her work as an artist, and on the development of an eclectic and idiosyncratic practice in performance, installation, film and sound. Through these early, isolated actions, the young American became a citizen of a wider world. In an important sense, Joan Grounds is an artist in the post-object tradition, since she works across a broad range of art forms and materials rather than pursuing a single practice. Arriving in Australia in 1969, Grounds became part of the widespread renovation of artistic practice in Sydney, exemplified, and in part triggered, by Christa's remarkable Wrapped coast of the same year. Grounds took up the legacy of post-object art positively: like other Australian artists of her generation, she has roamed what Rosalind Krauss has dubbed the 'expanded field' of sculpture and installation, exploring ideas, images and affects, rather than considering the status and limits of (post)modern art practice per se. In this hybrid practice she has been attentive to contemporary social issues, addressing them through a distinctive personal idiom that is nevertheless thoroughly feminist in its (implied) argument for collective political responsibility. 2 50 APT2002 _1 _l Seventh burning 1970 Three stills from 7 min. Super 8 video transferred to DVD Collection:The artist Today Grounds makes cross-disciplinary sculptures, installations and sound works that are mostly site-specific and often collaborative. From the mid-1980s onwards, she has worked with a lexicon of disparate objects and materials acknowledging the ephemerality of life. This has changed over time as elements have been added or subtracted, and relationships between them reconfigured from piece to piece. Grounds is sensitive, even hypersensitive, to the affective potentials of materials, choosing each, eventually, for what Victoria Lynn has called her passion for their metaphoric potential. 3 In 1989 George Alexander wrote about Grounds's repertoire: 'What does it represent? Itself, for a start. The plastic disposition of the elements are the content. But like words in a poem, each object-image is charged'. 4 Joan Grounds United States/Australia b.1939 Fortv-two books with one page 1995 Saa paper, cultured pearls, gold-plated mild steel, carbon 42 books: 37 x 30 x 16cm each Collection:The artist Photograph: Christopher Snee