Transcendence of the benign: ‘Hardenvale’ at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery
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The ongoing travelling installation Hardenvale – our home in Absurdia (2019) by Todd Fuller, Kellie O’Dempsey and Catherine O’Donnell emphasises the pervading universality of the Australian suburban experience. Inviting us along the metaphorical garden path, and inadvertently down an immersive rabbit hole, the artists take us on an upended journey through collective memories of suburbia that elicit mixed emotions of disquiet and delight.
A project more than two years in the making, Fuller, O’Dempsey and O’Donnell have created a three-dimensional full-scale reconstruction of a typical 1960s family home replete with formica furniture and a Hills hoist out the back. Drawing from three generations of experience, Hardenvale is imbued with myriad dualities. For some it may hold the memories of adolescence, dreams and family; for others it is marred with recollections of boredom, pain and loss. Here the artists have created a mise en scène for our personal reminiscences and moments of reflection to play out within the corridors.
Standing at the facade we are greeted by family familiars – a sculpted tyre swan and the projection of ambling dogs – as lamplight emanating through sets of venetian blinds beckons us inside. A soundscape of barking, rain, sweeping brooms and railway-crossing bells conjures the ambient noise of suburban life. The physical form of the building falls away at the periphery, first as bare stud walls and gauzy partitions, then into three-dimensional drawings. Through the threshold lies semi-barren rooms furnished with objects, drawings and moving images heady with nostalgia, marking the spaces as reliquaries of past memories. Lace doilies adorn side tables and a leather armchair takes pride of place alongside a framed collage of prized racing greyhounds. Light switches, blinds and lamps appear countless times throughout the installation – as the physical object, a drawing, an image within a photo frame or as a film projection. Playing with scale, these recurring images become motifs of the altered suburban experience, transforming the ordinary and mundane.
In the final room, domestic objects are overlaid with animated drawings to create a surreal space of alternate reality – a dreamscape of domestic life. Here 1970s desk lights are piled high atop towers of cardboard boxes, and projections of sink drains and snags on the barbie play as a humorous yet disquieting rendition of suburbia. Occupying this ambivalent shadow land of feeling and memory, Hardenvale forces us to interrogate the benign and find wonder in the everyday.
Rebecca Blake, Wagga Wagga
Having premiered at Sydney’s National Art School as part of the 2019 Dobell Drawing Prize, ‘Hardenvale – our home in Absurdia’ is currently on view at Wagga Wagga Art Gallery until 31 January 2021 before touring to Bathurst Regional Art Gallery (10 April – 30 May 2021) and Tamworth Regional Gallery (2 October – 28 November 2021).
