Artist Journal - PLANeT - Installation - 1998 - © Lloyd Godman

Artist Journal - Lloyd Godman

This installation of a large (8mx4m) globe  - map of the world - on the floor of 101 Collins St Gallery Annex, Melbourne, July 1998 was a part of the interim MFA exhibition of New Zealand candidates work.

The work consisted of 1730, 4" squares arranged in a grid pattern to form an elliptical map of the earth. The land area was represented by fragmented  C Type photographs from various other Photo…synthesis projects, (Photosynthesis, Plant Room,) while the ocean was represented by fragmented blue text printed on paper associated to relevant sources read over the period of the project.

Three weeks earlier my supervisors from RMIT had been over to visit and as a part of the visit we were required to show some new work. I had been busy with Class I fication, and the response I had received from the work to that point from other had been encouraging. However the supervisors response was completely the opposite, it was as one of them put it- " the worst piece of art he had ever seen" and he suggested that I had a show in Melbourne in 3 weeks so I had better come up with some more a more resolved new work.

It was obvious from his own work that he was interested in grids. I had been cutting up sections of the discarded prints I had been making and decided to create a large map based on the grid.

Recently in looking at the globe I had often been intrigued with the longitudinal and latitudinal lines which create a series of perfect squares when the earth is divided into a series of grids under certain projections.

I did some smaller sketches and then decided to increase the scale of the work - using discarded prints of the Photosynthetic images and the Plant room projects to cut the individual squares from to represent the land mass.

All the texts I had been reading from so many sources were swimming round in my head like an ocean - so I decided to fragment this literally - to print a series of texts from a range of relevant sources with blue ink and cut them up to fill the void of the ocean.

The work took many hours to install was with some satisfaction that the work was dispatched to Melbourne for the supervisors to install before my visit in time for the opening. While they responded well to the work and it had potential, I was still much more intrigued with light - plants and the process of photosynthesis.

The MFA Supervisor responded to the the work positively and suggested I " drop this plant thing and make work similar ton this". My response was that I knew he would like this work I had made it to prove a point and I would be continuing on with the plant works.

However the globe remain dormant for many years and resurfaced in a work titled Planet II, in 2006