con/sumption 03 2022

Summary

This reimagined glass bottle artwork by Jenna Lee is a part of the Metro Tunnel Creative Project Donation received by the Art and Heritage Collection in 2023. This sculpture takes as its starting point a glass bottle uncovered in the archaeological digs undertaken as a part of the Metro Tunnel Project.

The work was featured as a part of the exhibition 'Making the Metro Tunnel: Reflections by Contemporary Australian Artists' which took place at Domain House from 1 April - 7 May 2023, and prior to this was originally created for the exhibition 'Unearthed' produced in collaboration with Craft Victoria in 2022.

Commissioned by the Metro Tunnel Creative Program, the exhibition sought to "explore and celebrate the construction milestones of the Metro Tunnel Project, which has been under construction for several years. The artists in this exhibition have taken inspiration from archaeological digs, heavy machinery, the aesthetics of worksites and worker's equipment to produce their own portrayals of the project." - quote from 'Making the Metro Tunnel' exhibition catalogue, 2023

"Working with discarded materials from the archaeological dig associated with the Metro Tunnel construction, has been a new and exciting challenge—the materials themselves ask me to step outside my traditionally paper-based practice. I had to think of ways the paper from books I work with is connected to these objects through ways outside of just materiality. I found that it was only on digging through the discarded objects and studying their forms and origins did a clear series form, with the aim of not altering the archaeological remains too much, but rather adding to them to change the way they are read. While simultaneously being dispossessed from land and waters and having children stolen, our words were served up with no connection to people or place for consumption of colonists in the form of ‘Aboriginal Word handbooks’. The series ‘con/sumption’ combines pages of these books with remnants of colonial objects of consumption (glass bottles) into transformed and translated forms of cultural pride. - Jenna Lee, quote from 'Making the Metro Tunnel' exhibition catalogue, 2023