Last weekend I visited Ken Unsworth’s moving tribute to his wife Elizabeth – a self-funded installation encompassing several gallery spaces and a complete ballroom – all built inside the Turbine Shop at Sydney’s Cockatoo Island. The show started with a private function for nearly 200 people, involving performance pieces and a banquet, on 28 May 2009.
The three metre skeleton in the work Razed by Glass (“light, sound, movement”) is a macabre creature that’s repeatedly hoisted by a mechanism, whereupon it wacks the ground alarmingly with its cane and is then lowered – the cycle instigated by the ringing of a crystal flute in a little motorised contraption.
The setting of In the Shadow of Stars is a darkened room, in which we see Elizabeth’s bed, a black and white television and video footage of her. (Unsworth nursed her for a long period before she died.)
In the next room, Toyland Fever is a beautiful reflection on and memorial to Elizabeth’s prodigious abilities as a pianist (for which she’d been recognised as a child). The tiny, child-sized pianos seem to float and sing in the air in a light and fragile way.
And in the final installation room we encounter The last song from the four last songs for Elizabeth, a work using the suspended parts of a grand piano, similar to the one that Elizabeth had for much of her life.
The SMH has articles on this labour of love here and here. I found visiting these works, on a cold Sydney winter Sunday (having taken the ferry from Circular Quay) a moving experience. Unsworth is operating from the heart, and there are few artistic strategies involved.
John Berger reminds us in About looking of Marcuse’s statement that art is the “great refusal” (the protest against that which is), and this show had me pondering on this idea, and on Unsworth’s statement as a refusal to let his wife’s passing go unnoticed.
