Street Address
City, State, Zip
Phone Number
Your Custom Text Here
The Watch Room
installation, 3oocm x 300cm x 210 cm
shown as part of Where there is Water, curated by Meryl Ryan, Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery, 2011-2012.
Shaping the shoreline with its endless motion, the sea defines the land; it rises, it falls, it swallows it whole. An obstacle or barrier between people and places, a marker of time as well as passage.
Witnessing this perpetual advance and retreat, the lighthouse sits on the headland, the light from the lantern room offering a mute warning to those travellers who, through bad luck or folly, might go astray. Beneath the lantern room is the watch room, where the keeper prepares the lanterns, trims the wicks, winds the clockworks, and watches.
Partly domestic, partly museological, the watch room is a space to hold the remains of an eternity of silent observation. It is a repository for the events and stories such a building might witness – for tragedy, but also endless monotony, for loss and dislocation, but also the faint hope offered by scraps of correspondence, carried across the endless sea.
