Image credit: Sam Roberts
Sisyphean Action, like much of my work, is primarily concerned with how the animate and inanimate bodies connect, compare and impact one another.
The rock being a rough, dense, hard and heavy object provides comparison to the soft body and resistance for the body to become taught against. The body remains comparatively soft even when the brace is the most intense. Tension and release are key in this movement vocabulary.
Performer/maker: Alison Currie
Concept and performance by Alison Currie Performance at 'Soft Spot, Hard Feelings' curated by Ray Harris for SALA Festival 2017 - documentation by Sam Roberts
Image credit: Sam Roberts
Sisyphean Action was performed on O'Sullivan Beach as part of SUE - Series of Unexpected Events.
Image credit: Sam Roberts
Both body and rock are firm in comparison to the softer sand, yet the sand increases resistance and so more effort is required. The performance took place four times over the course of the day with with four rocks of increasing sizes used in each performance.
Image credit: Sam Roberts
The title Sisyphean Action labels this act as futile, laborious and pointless, this is self referential as I have found in order to demonstrate or explore something I am interested in I often create ridiculously difficult and seemingly pointless tasks for myself - in this case pushing a heavy rock up the slope of a gallery floor and along a beach. The title is also a direct reference to the greek god Sisyphus who was sentenced to pushing a bolder up a hill for eternity.
Image credit: Sam Roberts
Sisyphean Action was supported by LWDance Hub, Arts South Australia, OSCA, City of Onkaparinga and Australia Council for the Arts. Thanks to Ray Harris, Paul Gazzola, Sam Roberts and Insite Arts.
Commissioned by the City of Onkaparinga
13 – 31st October 2017
SUE is a creative festival of performance based interventions. SUE explores how innovative art events within outer suburban locations, spaces not normally associated with contemporary arts practice, can produce fleeting moments of difference, interest and intrigue to daily routines.
SUE explores the curatorial themes of the unexpected, wonder and play to open-up a fluid and playful space for artistic strategies that can surprise, startle and astonish the public through uncommon and extraordinary activities. SUE gathers a group of artists whose practices employ performative, installation & time based outcomes (strategies not normally represented within the ONK public art framework) to create a suite of unexpected interventions across 20 selected sites.
Whist ONK has recently seen a dramatic increase in the creation of permanent public art works, SUE recognises how the temporality of unexpected performance based interventions can add another creative dimension to public art strategies that explore and celebrate the diversity of culture, community, geography, history and land in the area.
SUE took place across the 5 wards of ONK and include the creation of 10 new works by established local and national Australian artists. The diversity of sites across ONK, offered the artists and curator alike a fertile space for experimentation and innovation within form, practice and content.
PARTICIPATING SUE ARTISTS: Carlie Angel, Valerie Berry, David Cross, Alison Currie, Nadia Cusimano, James Dodd, Ruby Dolman, Sara Morawetz, Tobiah Booth-Remmers, Henry Jock Walker and Meg Wilson.
Soft Spot, Hard Feelings is a group exhibition curated by Ray Harris for the South Australian Living Artists Festival. Soft Spot, Hard Feelings was a month long exhibition culminating in a performance night in which Sisyphean Action was performed.
Promotion material for Sisyphean Action at Soft Spot, Hard Feelings at SALA Festival.
Performer/maker: Alison Currie