Honours art exhibition coming up

The work of eight outstanding artists is being featured in the upcoming Southern Cross University Visual Arts Honours Graduate Exhibition 2009.

The exhibition is being held in V-block at the Lismore campus and runs from Friday, November 20, to Friday, November 27, from 9am-5pm on weekdays and from 10am to 5pm on Saturday, November 21.

Bangalow artist Mark Richards is one of the artists being featured with his thought-provoking and confronting series of baby sculptures titled Snow Boy. His work is both about the search for identity and about consumer capitalism.

In one sculpture of a white baby hanging by its arms, titled Shylock’s Pound, Mark said he was alluding to the fact that we are all so much in debt from living on credit that we are paying for it with 'a pound of flesh' – echoing back to Shakespeare's play ‘A Merchant of Venice’ when Shylock sets a bond of ‘a pound of flesh' from Antonio for his loan.

The white baby and the ‘Snow Boy’ title of the installation both refer to Marks’s birth in Yokohama, Japan to Australian/Japanese parents. It was mid-spring and despite the season, it was snowing outside - a rare event which the doctor interpreted as an auspicious omen and suggested that the baby should be called Yukio - Snow Boy - but his dad chose Mark instead.

“In my work I am adapting and appropriating archival images of baby forms to create a psychological space for self-reflection,” Mark said.

“The work also attempts to build a dialogue between the struggle for survival and the disillusionment I feel towards consumer capitalism.”

Other featured artists in the exhibition are Alison Baily, Katie Cross, Tom Fitzgerald, Cedar Henderson, Joanna Kambourian, Michael Moynihan, Mark Richards, and Dawn Thirlaway.

Photo: Artist Mark Richards, one of eight artists featured in the Honours exhibition.