Sue Pedley : Margaret Roberts

Sue Pedley Sound of Bamboo, Royal Botanical Gardens Sydney Sound of Bamboo was a three part installation by Sue Pedley in the Sydney Botanical Gardens in September 2002. It used red wool and found bamboo, inspired in part by her experiences during residencies in Sri Lanka and Vietnam. It also continued a longer term exploration of the surprise created by strong colour in unexpected locations - as food colouring bleeding through white plaster or coloured wool interwoven with natural settings - as intrusions which present the locations as much as themselves. In Sound of Bamboo, the red woollen yarn was woven through two bamboo stands in the lower part of the Gardens, making two enigmatic horizontal blocks of red colour, one also reflected in the water beside it. They could not be confused with the colour of flowers or the pattern of leaves or insects, leaving viewers without explanations for their peculiar presence. They made more sense by putting your head into the bamboo stand itself, looking down into the weaving of red wool and green branch from above - giving its spatial abstraction more room to compete with the more familiar context of the garden. Once viewers arrive at the 'third' part of the work, however, we realise that the 'first' two also operate as pointers, as Sue herself called them, or as warm-ups or even spread-outs, in some way secondary to the third part of the work in the larger bamboo, but still essential as tails or strands further out in space. In this third part, the red and orange woollen fabric segments wrapped around the hollow bamboo tubes in the larger bamboo stand make vertical lines of colour which gently disturb our interpretation of space. The stand of bamboo has various references for different people - its reference to Asia being one - but it also is part of the ordinary lived world in which it is unambiguously a stand of bamboo. The disturbance occurs because the wollen wrappings confuse scale, and - perhaps assisted by the intense activity of graffitti-marks cut into most of the bamboo tubes - suggest we are also looking at a drawing. The work thus playfully asks us to accommodate something as both ordinary and unambiguous at the same time as being more open and multilayered in meaning. The ambiguity of scale hints at the similarity between a stand of giant bamboo and a bunch of grass, for example, an ambiguity which can also flow over into consideration of the dispersions involved in the location of an emblem of nearby Asia in a Botanical Garden originating in in distant Europe. It is the gentle integration of the space of art-activity with ordinary lived space which enables consideration of meanings inherent in the latter. Margaret Roberts