The Sorrows Multiply explores the power of design to evoke the innumerable scale of contemporary events. A direct response to the situation in Iraq, the exhibition attempts to visualise the magnitude and tragedy of the ongoing conflict.

Situated below the ceiling of the gallery, metres of paper squares are stacked. 115,800 in total they represent the most conservative estimate of civilian causalities in the conflict. Over the course of the exhibition they are mechanically pushed to the floor below. Blown around the gallery space, they build in number consuming the room in a violent and mesmeric snowstorm.

Since the US led invasion of March 20, 2003, thousands of Iraqi civilians have died. Estimates vary between one hundred thousand and a million*. In a country where half the population is aged under 19 the effects of this devastation are particularly profound.

For each death countless more lives have been destroyed: through physical injury, psychological damage and personal loss.

The United States government withdrew most of their remaining troops and declared the war’s end in December 2011. Despite claiming to have left a “a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq” thousands continue to die in Iraq as a result of political instability and sectarian violence.

—
Iraq Body Count
The Iraq Body Count project is an independent organisation that has tracked civilian deaths since the
beginning of the conflict. The project compiles its figures from English-language news media, NGO-based reports, and publically available official records. The project only records deaths from violent means. Those who died from secondary aspects of the conflict (destroyed health infrastructure, poor sanitation, hunger etc) are not represented. The organisation takes its name from US General Tommy Franks’ statement “We don’t do body counts.”

The Lancet
One of the world’s most respected medical journals, The Lancet published two peer-reviewed studies on the effect of the Iraq war on the civilian mortality rate. The second survey, published in 2006, at the peak of the conflict, estimated 654,965 excess deaths related to the war, or 2.5% of the population. Of these 31% were attributed to Coalition forces, 24% to others and 46% unknown.

DAB Lab Gallery, University of Technology Sydney
April 2-27, 2012

Like the stars, the sea is often used as a site of contemplation. Viewed from the shore the horizon forms an endless and subtly shifting field of perception. Oceanic: Installation One merges hundreds of Flickr photos of the world’s oceans into a 5-minute video installation. In doing so it aims to speak of this collective experience and to unify the worlds oceans and seas back into a single, universal ocean.

Oceanic: Installation One is a video installation first exibited as part of The etcc Exhibition at Sydney's Ambush gallery from May 13-15. An umbrella event of the annual Semi-Permanent design conference, The etcc Exhibition sought to address issues of remixing and authorship within the framework of contemporary copyright law. Funded by a Catalyst Grants program from the Creative Commons organisation, the exhibition invited artists to create original works by remixing creative commons content available through social media content sites such as Flickr and youtube. Three consectuive exhibitions in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne are being held, with the works from the first show in Sydney (including Oceanic) being reappropriated and remixed by artists to form the content of the second show and so on. In this way the works draw from, but also contribute to, a process of creative exchange and dialogue within the larger framework of contemporary media culture.

Oceanic: Installation One is a prototype for a larger work-in-progress.

Exhibited May 13 at the etcc Exhibition, Ambush Gallery, part of Semi Permanent 2011.

Sheet Music explores the potential of electrically conductive inks to transform a piece of graphic design into an electronic component. Printed with silver ink these two posters work as aerials picking up variations in the room’s electromagnetic field caused by gallery visitors. Electronics enclosed in the wall convert these variations to sound, allowing participants to ‘play’ the posters by moving their hands in front of them.

Sheet Music is a collaboration with composer Ian Stevenson.

Exhibited in Graphic Material at the UTS Gallery, Sydney, Aug 3–Sep 3, 2010.

Burnt Lakes is a meditation on the effects of climate change on the Australian landscape. As the effects of global warming begin to bite, water takes on new poetic resonances and its absence speaks of the urgency of what confronts us. A pair of spotlit, crisp white stacks of paper sit side by side. Into the tops of each is lasercut a lake-shaped depression, an ashen void burnt out of the pure white surface of the paper.

First created as a 3D computer model, each of the lakes was then virtually sliced into 50 horizontal sections. Each slice was then fed individually to a lasercutter. Once cut, the individual sheets of paper were stacked in order, materialising the virtual model of the lake as an absence in the pile of paper.

Exhibited in Graphic Material at the UTS Gallery, Sydney, Aug 3–Sep 3, 2010.

Graphic Material, an exhibition I curated at Sydneyʼs University of Technology Gallery, sought to explore the impact of new digital fabrication and materials technologies on contemporary graphic design practice.

Graphic Material featured commissioned and curated work from an international selection of graphic designers: from Australia, Collider, Toko, Vince Frost, Mark Gowing, Trigger, Ian Stevenson and myself; from the UK, Jeremy Wood, Graphic Thought Facility and Postspectacular, Jürg Lehni from Switzerland, Bert Simons from the Netherlands and Sabrina Raaf from the United States.

For more detail go to
www.graphic-material.com

Graphic Material, UTS Gallery, Aug 3– Sept 3