Small World

Do you see all the same people at every exhibition opening? Small world isn’t it? We’re a tiny portion of a sprawling city. There are thousands of small worlds, circling each other, and occasionally intersecting. Those chance meetings with familiar faces make the world seem smaller. To some people those meetings provide a comforting sense of community, to others it’s stifling.
We cannot possibly, in the space provided, tackle the whole world and everyone in it. Here we are looking at small worlds. The world has been shrunk so that you have a Creator’s Eye View. Peek through the spy glasses, move around a chunk of the planet, peer down into the maze and see what those inside it are denied.
For Sean O’Keeffe all the world’s a stage. Peer through the pin hole to the spy on the dramatic scenes. Daniel Dorall has created miniature labyrinths. The audience is a voyeur, spying on private grief and predicting the fate of the trapped game, but powerless to intercede.
Scale models are used by all manner of creative people – shipbuilders, architects, and engineers all make models. They use them to think through their work in progress and to explain their plans to their clients.

Here, rather than a model aeroplane or ship in a bottle, we see a scaled down Earth with its many people. From this distance their dramas seem inconsequential.
John Howland has placed magnifying glasses over maps of the coastline. The cloud patterns suspended overhead are the shapes of his friends who live in the area. The people become part of their environment and the two-hundred year struggle of non-indigenous Australians to belong to this place is played out. These clouds are a nourishing part of the landscape but they are not the soil or the deep roots of the trees. They are part of the environment, but they are not fixed to a single town or coastline.

Anna-Maria O’Keeffe’s pieces of landscape are like rubble from a building that’s seen the wreckers. Like the most frustrating of jigsaws, or the remains of a classical sculpture, the pieces refuse to join together again. It is as if the world has ended with a Big Bang, as some argue it began, and shards of the planet have flown in every direction. Here they are, captured calmly a million years later, by enthusiastic researchers trying to piece together evidence of human life.

Or perhaps they are not an end, but a rather more hopeful beginning – where what we are seeing is the workbench of a Creator who has just popped out for a moment. Further still, we are put in the position of Creator-sized being, looking at a tiny earth, and are confronted with our power to create and nurture or neglect and destroy.

Small worlds simultaneously evoke thoughts of the apocalyptic and embryonic, the monumental and the flippant.

Kate Clifford