The rock solid Weet-Bix scraps in her kids’ breakfast bowls struck home for Braidwood artist Lizzie Hall.
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Nationalism was on her mind, and she began to think about the way Australians erect walls.
The idea became a conceptual piece for a show in Canberra, with bricks fired from Weet-Bix and PVA forming a wall.
“I was thinking about nationalism and sort of refugee immigrant situation, and I was thinking about how our nationalism and our identity puts a wall up between us and the rest of the world,” Ms Hall said.
Ms Hall began making sculpture while pregnant in a flat in Melbourne, thinking about the victims of war, and women with children in those situations.
The soft harmlesss tanks came to minimise and mock the aggressor, making hard weapons of war impotent toys.
“It was kind of just trying to take the piss out of the scary shit I guess,” Ms Hall said.
After eight years in Braidwood, Ms Hall has mellowed a bit, but still uses Weet-Bix as her preferred sculptural medium. With no training in more traditional sculptural mediums, its simplicity has allowed her to dive straight in.
“I started making stuff out of Weet-Bix a couple of years ago because it was more conceptual,” Lizzie said.
“It was fun, it’s a cool material... so I started making sculptures that are with paint, that have nothing to do with nationalism, or Weet-Bix,” Ms Hall said.
One of her more recent sculptures ‘Self portrait with a broken hula hoop’ caught the eye of the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize judges.
The work is one of the finalists in the prize which celebrates small sculpture.
Her latest project is a re-imagining of the famous Brancusi Birds in Space, humanising the perfect fluid lines of the original sculpture.
“I’m making really lumpy kind of human versions of them, because they’re like perfect,” Ms Hall said.
“I thought I’ll take his perfection and make it imperfect again.”
These will be among the works displayed at ‘Playing with the Past’, a series of variations on the works of well known artists opening at the Left Hand during the QPRC Arts Trail on October 21-22.