The Unravelling of Form: The Viaduct Project, 1995, Annandale Park, Glebe. Curated by Barbara Halnan and Rose Ann McGreevy.
Unravelling production is in itself a type of reproduction. The creation of a space from which it becomes possible to examine the infrastructure and material logic of the process of reason. This essay is best read as a manual which retrospectively examines the work of eight separate exhibitions covering a period of as many years. The arrangement of images in this catalogue is neither chronological or formal and suggests a larger practice rather than an isolated series of exhibitions. For a clear discussion of what would otherwise appear formless this discussion divides these image into four areas of production, reason, time and materials.
Works such as “The Unravelling of Form“, “The Destiny of Objects“, and “Disintoxication” present an “off the rectangle” assault on the history and ideology of rectilinear thinking. These exhibitions are characterised by their wildly frozen ejaculations of wool and unrelated accumulations of objects. Out of this discord a dialogue results which stands in opposition to a productivist mechanism of symbolic exchange. The use of both altered and unaltered ready made products such as clothes, toys, food, cooking utensils, glassware and a wide range of manufactured goods enables Liz Day to sabotage the destiny of these materials. One outcome of this disorderly arrangement is to recognise the gap that separate public and private spaces. These works don’t simply recycle commodities as objects but through a process of both physical and ideological destruction unravel the codes of commodification.
Excerpt from Christine Dean, Unravelling Production, 1996, in “The Offcuts of Reason: Works by Elizabeth Day”, catalogue, 1997.
ELIZABETH DAY 