Performance in the Landscape 2: Sentinel

The accompanying ritual event was enacted on the Spring Equinox 1985, at Beachmere, Queensland. Fire-sticks described the stars of the Zodiac as a mirror image of their location in the night sky on that occasion. This was an act of acknowledgment, of awareness. An haiku poem about unity was attached to each fire-stick and was accompanied by a feather. The ellipse of the sky was marked out as a 21m x 9m (approx) enclosure of twigs. This approximated the egg-shape of the previous work, Mandala, 1984, and indicated a reference to interconnectedness and continuance. This was an attempt to represent, symbolically, the southern sky by that band of stars common to both hemispheres, which, with the addition of the Southern Cross, became a gesture, an attempt to encompass the vastness of infinite time and space, and in a sense of the global, while still acknowledging the individual, the local. There was also a desire to somehow reflect that understanding of ourselves as part of that miniscule floating entity that was the earth, which we saw from space in 1969 for the first time, and so to somehow represent the vast macro-multiverse, in tension with the familiar "encapsulated" locale of our own particular niche or earthly habitat.