Sunday, December 18, 2005

COURT


After building replica milk crates from recycled cardboard for a few years, a friend suggested I make a large one for the 2005 McClelland Scuplture Survey and Award. I applied and was selected, to my surprise. I was too familiar with getting turned down for stuff. With the help of my brothers carpentry skills, we slowly constructed the 3m x 3m x 3m work over three months. The interior was 2.4 metres in height to echo the regulation suburban ceiling height.

This is what Robert Nelson had to say in his review for The Age.
'Jarrad Kennedy pays similar homage to a popular image in his Court, which is a paradoxical title for a giant inverted milk crate. The extruded plastic construction has been interpreted in wood, so that it resembles a kind of pergola or walk-in timber gazebo. Once inside, the architecture loses all sense of a crate, as a robust domesticity displaces any frisson of illegality of stolen commercial property.' (18 January 2006)

*At the conclusion of the exhibition in 2006, the sculpture was moved to Kinglake where it was destroyed by the Black Saturday fires in 2009.