My research for this exhibition has caused me to investigate a form of Australian masculinity as it is created, moulded and represented via socio-political, climatic and geo-historic conditions.

The exhibition is titled The Seminal Bloke. I chose this name initially because I have a great fondness for word-play, which I often carry through to the work I make. I also wanted a title that somehow could encapsulate as many of the diverse ideas that comprise my PhD thesis. A close friend and fellow PhD candidate, Jane Naylor suggested Sentimental Bloke after the novel by C.J.Dennis ‘The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke’ (1915). A quick ear for a pun and I immediately had The Seminal Bloke.

It was perfect as it not only spoke of men in the vernacular, it also played with the double entendre of ‘seminal’ meaning at the same time ‘semen-like’; and also: ‘containing an idea or set of ideas that forms a basis for later developments’, and: of ‘critical importance; essential’.

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There are three uniforms represented in this exhibition. Each of them corresponds to a particular avenue of cultural historicity, yet relies on stereotypical portrayal to drive home their significance. The use of a uniform reflects the concept of group-belonging and suggests both adherence to a social structure of some type as well as banishing individuality for ‘sameness’. It also implies ‘homovestism’ or the desire to wear the clothes of the same sex.

This work reconstructs a World War One soldier in the Light Horse Infantry. The uniform is replete with badges, insignia, water bottle, rifle, bandolier, spare horse-shoe pack, ostrich plumes and gaters, and is made entirely (as are all of the uniforms) from aluminium flyscreen wire.

The uniform stands dismounted, as if at attention, gun by the side but without the body. It is a shadow reminiscent of an empty husk, desiccated by time yet preserving the form of the original inhabitant somewhat like a cicada shell. The uniform is crisp and stiff as if newly pressed and donned, unmarked by trench mud and shrapnel tears; it has not yet seen battle, hence the absence of medals or ribbons. It signifies someone who is about to embark on a journey to the unknown, perhaps terrified yet determined, strong in the knowledge that what he is about to undertake is the right thing to do, what is expected by King and country. But there is a sense of sadness about it, like the melancholy of old photographs. I felt this very strongly when researching the uniform as it entailed browsing through hundreds of photographs from the Australian War Memorial archives. Image after image gave a name and (most often) date of death in conflict; face after face of handsome young men destined to die within a year or two of the picture being taken. It struck me of the similarities I experienced when looking through my own photo albums of the countless young friends I have seen die a young death through the 1980’s and 1990’s.

Cocky consists of a flyscreen mesh oilskin coat draped over one of the arms at the top of a clear acrylic hatstand. A mesh Akubra sits perched on another arm. On the floor a pair of flyscreen Blundstone boots lies casually strewn as if recently kicked off. This uniform, unlike Digger is in the process of being used. Ghostly and ethereal, it doesn’t reflect back to the dark turbulent years of wartime but instead hangs momentarily in time and space, lifelessly awaiting further use. It is also not situated at any historical juncture as is Digger, but is timeless and redolent of the ethos of rural Australia.

This work is ostensibly me. Or a part of me, the part that is here, now in the present. Bikie is modelled from my own motorcycle gear, and represents both the ‘contemporary’ and my position within it. It is the ‘modern’, the city, speed, fast living and the dangerous. It is also about freedom - the freedom in particular that becoming a motorbike rider has given me; the freedom of the road and every other cliché that comes with it, and the freedom to align myself with the attitudes, generalisations and milieu that has generated around the culture of the motorbike.

I have depicted this mesh ghost-rider on an invisible motorbike; a Perspex base etched with the engine of my Triumph Speed Triple, in riding position as if it is on the road. I wanted the sculpture to signify action and movement as if it has somewhere to go. It has a forward momentum than seems determined to leave the past behind.

There is an ever present danger in motorbike riding, and the Bikie signifies the perilous nature that my life has been over the past 20 years; the excitingly fraught combination of speed and danger is an appropriate metaphor for how my life has been lived. The rider has had a few scrapes over the years, the occasional fall, but he is still seated.

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There are three suburban household objects represented in the exhibition. A garden shed a lawnmower and a barbecue. These three items reflect on my childhood and adolescence. They are characteristic of the 1970’s when I was growing up in the outer western suburbs of Sydney, and are representative of suburbia, triple-fronted brick homes, quarter acre lots, panel vans, Sundays spent mowing the lawns and washing the cars, and barbecues. I selected these three items as each one was particularly associated with men, but each deals with a different aspect of masculinity.

This was the first of the three objects I completed. The effort to complete it was motivated by desire to enter it into The Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW (for which it was selected for exhibition) which gave me a deadline in early 2005.

The work is made in separate panels: 4 walls, a raised floor and a trestle roof, complete with ‘corrugated’ iron, guttering and drainpipes. Inside Shed are many of the things one would find in a suburban garden shed - such as benches, tools, step-ladder, garden forks and hoes, rubbish bin and even a dart board. There is also a small Victa lawnmower with its handle folded.

The design for this work came from my memories of my fathers own shed that he built in the back yard in about 1973-74. The general attitude of the times allocated the house as the domain of the wife/mother. She ran it, cleaned it and patrolled it as she often spent most of her time there. If the man of the house was a drinker, he could claim his space down at the pub after work with his mates. Or if he wasn’t, he needed to create his own. And that is often what the shed became - a personal ‘male space’.

Shed is a symbol of all those places of solitude that men would retreat to, sometimes for their hobbies, sometimes just to get away from life for a moments peace to dream. It stands, for me at least, as a retreat from the troubles and cacophony of life and a chance to reflect about one’s fortunes.

The 1970’s of my childhood were still rife with examples of gendered activities, and weekends made them self-evident. Groups of headless hoons huddled over erect car bonnets, mothers vacuuming and cooking, fathers mowing, changing the oil or clearing the gutters; everyone had their designated tasks and they all fitted neatly into their suburban sex roles. Lawn-mowing was symptomatic of this era and of these differentiated and gendered behavioural patterns.

The lawnmower sits uncomfortably in my memory, partly because as a teenager, it became the bane of my weekends. The vibrating whirr of the neighbours’ ritualised mowings early on Sunday mornings would wake me constantly whilst trying to sleep in. It was also one of the chores that the male children of our house had to undertake on occasions.

Naturally I chose the Victa as representative of lawn mowers generally as thanks to the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games the entire world now knows the symbolism of the Victa.

As a child I was fascinated with the idea of the barbecue. Once it had been established that my family were emigrating to Australia I began reading about the place and paying attention when it was mentioned on the radio or television. I was about 10 years old. I knew more than was necessary to know about marsupials (which permitted me to scoff superciliously at Skippy) and that there were several species of deadly spider, some towns in the outback still had dirt streets, and intriguingly, you could cook your dinner beside the road. So you can see I was well informed.

In the suburbs, everyone had a barbecue. And in my neighbourhood many of them were home made, not the fancy metal and gas ones you see today on the 12th floor of apartment buildings, but good solid brick and mortar types. These became synonymous with social gatherings where men and women were segregated through social convention and custom. An extraordinary sex role reversal would occur on a Saturday night/Sunday arvo when men would take up the spatula and cook the lunch/evening meal. This is the same group of men who wouldn’t know how to prepare a frozen chook for Sunday lunch, or wouldn’t dream of doing so if they did. Yet, for some reason, when the mention of ‘barbecue’ comes around, they are instantly out in the yard with the rolled up newspaper, firestarters and some kero, yakking to their mates. And if one dared to make reference to the inside/outside anomaly of cooking, the typical response would be "Don’tcha know all the great chefs are men, eh?"

But for the purposes of this exhibition, the barbecue is symbolic of mateship. It contains echoes of the tribal gathering, maturation rites ("Son - you can light the coals today") and masculine intercourse. Being home-built implies an almost apologetic tipping the hat to the pioneering spirit, self-sufficiency and male endeavour. The gatherings around the barbecue still happen, but times have changed, attitudes have changed, the food has changed, and so I have built the back-yard brick barbie principally as a memento of nostalgia.

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I have been making artwork from flyscreen wire for as long as I have been exhibiting. But there has been one angle I have never before approached and that was using the wire mesh in an environment it was originally intended for - flyscreen doors. The door is suggestive of symbolic portals between opposites: in and out, past and present, bush and city, childhood and adulthood. Flyscreen keeps out flies.

Each of these doors is a self portrait and by placing myself into them I symbolically connect myself to all three of the represented characters, donning their various attributes in a way that enforces the notion of the fluidity of identity.

This door characterises the qualities inherent in the bush, rural Australia, the outback however you want to call it. It is made from the raw materials that the country has provided: wood, iron and bauxite (aluminium ore). The image on this door is intended to be a self portrait as a bushranger, an anti-hero. A figure that symbolises the early history of this country and the contradictory position bushrangers held in the formation of a national identity.

I wanted this work to be humourous therefore I chose to use blowflies to create the image. They seemed to be the right thing for a flyscreen door in the outback. Moonlite was also the name of the bushranger who, historians generally concur was homosexual. (And therefore there is a small vulgar joke in the title as ‘back door’ is slang for ‘anus’ in gay parlance!)

Having represented the country with the Moonlite piece, this next door salutes urban Australia and the early years of Australian film by utilising a scene from a classic black and white film called Jewelled Nights (1925) starring Australian actress Louise Lovely. The film is about a socialite who dons men’s clothing in order to pass herself off as a prospector during the era of Australia’s gold rush. By superimposing myself into the role of that prospector I was adding a further layer to the already multiple character/gender shifts found in the film – female actor playing a woman socialite playing a man; and playfully bringing into the forefront how dissolute the nature of gender representation can be. The concept of ‘drag’ was not uncommon in early film narratives, especially female to male, and was not considered especially controversial.

Because the nature of film is about artificiality and make-believe, I deliberately searched for fake brick wallpaper and a plastic plant to reinforce the fictitious nature of on-screen and also off-screen identities. I also wanted to deliberate on the fluctuating nature of gender and sex and reference the queer notion of the mutability of sexual identity; inasmuch as everything isn’t always what it seems.

Silverscreendoor overlaps the categories silver-screen with screen-door and provides the title for this sculpture.

This door is based on my own bedroom door which is modern, aluminium with floor to ceiling glass panels and opens onto a balcony with views over Sydney harbour. The carpet at the foot of this door is to suggest that, unlike the other two doors, this door is looking outwards.

Whilst the other two were inward and introspective, this door looks towards the future. The surf lifesaver has been called ‘The Soldier of the Surf’ and is considered a hero by many. With a superbly fit, muscular lean body that derives from labour not gyms, coupled with the voluntary dedication to saving lives, he is considered an exemplar of contemporary masculinity, and breakfast cereal companies beat down their doors for sponsorship.

The lifesaver has gained a prominent place in the annals of Australian icons and still maintains a respected place in the culture. I chose to separate the mesh layers of this work to suggest that these days the manifold layers that constructs our identity as a nation, and our identities as individuals has become a little easier to peel back, observe, critique and analyse.

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For over seven years I was visiting a Macquarie Street skin specialist to have skin cancers either frozen or lasered from my face. During that entire period I avoided any sun, hugging the shadows, wearing hats and sunscreen; each year enduring more and more laser or liquid nitrogen treatment. One year I had to see someone different, my specialist was too busy and I was going on a long trip overseas. I needed my annual dose of cancers burn off. This new specialist wanted to do a biopsy which was something my old specialist never suggested. The biopsy came back negative. I had a type of psoriasis. Do you know what is good for psoriasis? Sunlight and salt water. I was quite angry.

A Spot in the Sun is a digital replication of one of the most iconic Australian images ever made - The Sunbather by Max Dupain. My image is constructed from more than 4,500 digital pictures of skin cancers altered to mimic the original photograph. In this work I have chosen to re-contextualise and subvert the original photographs intention, by restructuring it within a contemporary framework, thus distorting the cultural message to one which is antithetical yet socio-politically important.

This is a fairly straight forward digital self portrait. It is constructed out of thousands of small images that represent the gamut of Australian masculinity throughout the course of the nation’s history since settlement. I have used all of the images I have collected over the years as potential resources for my PhD research to produce the sepia coloured background. The figure of myself as a contrast has been made from images that are all autobiographical and cover every aspect of my life from childhood to present and represent a panoply of my own sense of self identity.

The final work in this exhibition is a self portrait in vegemite and Sao’s. Things don’t come more Aussie than vegemite and Sao’s! (Ironically, both Kraft, the maker of Vegemite, and Arnott’s the Sao manufacturers are now owned by American companies.)

In this self portrait I become everything I dislike about the ocker. Portrayed as a beer-bellied, smoking, thong wearing, stubby drinking couch potato, I attempt to make the portrait the antithesis to who and what I am. I am a non smoker and non drinker, and I am not the least bit interested in cars. The flying ducks are meant to represent a type of suburban lifestyle, but in reality, like the ocker presented here, that is pretty much a thing of the past.

Of course, the work is meant to be funny, and in that quintessentially Aussie way, humour is often about taking the piss. (Well don’t piss yourself laughing…yeah I know its piss weak…whah…ok now I’m getting pissed…Oh piss off.)

Terry Culver,

25th May 2006