The Fourth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

Columbus visits the cave of Guadalupe (detail) 1995 Importantly, Grounds works through the vernacular. Nearly every element in her work, whether transformed or straightforwardly transported from its original context, exists in the daily world. This accessibility is crucial, existing in striking tension with the complex and shifting readings that the work as a whole suggests. Grounds unlocks the potential of things and materials to meaning, combining and juxtaposing elements from her repertoire of object-images. This process closely resembles poetry, since the connections that Grounds sets up operate through metonymy rather than through narrative, metaphor rather than mimesis, and indeed as often through disjunction and discrepancy as through association. 5 Grounds works with allusion, rather than with direct or didactic address, invoking elliptical, ambiguous, often playful associations. While there are no pre-ordained codes governing the relationships between these elements - there is no grammar as such, and the interrelationships are peculiar to each installation - often very small objects or images are the key to the whole. Moreover, the spaces in which Grounds works are always considered as integral: volume, materials, history, resonances - all are taken into account. Thus while Grounds's placement of each object animates the space she uses, that space in turn brings its own irreducible character to her works. Here is an incomplete inventory of Grounds's images and materials across recent works: saa paper sheets, handmade in Thailand from mulberry leaves; living trees in pots, and bark from a forest giant; long golden needles; tiny gleaming pearls; water and bricks; a woodsman's axe cast into bronze; little slippers like children's, also fashioned out of saa paper; a gold locket attached to an extremely long, fine gold chain; handmade cotton threads. Both thread and chain suggest quasi-sacred affiliations, whether spiritual or personal, and Grounds has used both for over a decade. 6 52 APT2002 Columbus visits the cave of Guadalupe 1995 Saa paper, cast bronze axe, monk's string, gold ring, stringy-bark tree and eucalyptus log Dimensions variable Collection: The artist Photograph: Pacchi Dang In Columbus visits the cave of Guadalupe 1995, a fine thread connects a bronze axe to a tiny gold ring, set into a great piece of bark stripped whole from a huge tree. The disjunctions of scale and between materials are unsettling, even disturbing. Take the beautiful sharp axe. It is highly ambivalent: on the one hand an essential daily tool; but cast into bronze, the traditional material of sculpture, it seems to commemorate ecological destruction. At the mythopoeic level, the axe is the quintessential weapon of European fairy stories, heavy and threatening . Yet here it is tied to a delicate thread, and leads, remarkably, to a fine gold ring. Paradoxically, this fine thread is an image of strength, of filiation; a practical manifestation of the connectedness of all things, including human beings and their actions. When the thread enters into the 'cave' of the Virgin of Guadalupe of the title, it also disappears into the dark and sacred mysteries of the earth, which may never be fully comprehended.