image: littoral 1998 installation view at Artspace, Sydney courtesy the artist

... the littoral zone sits between (and accommodates) the high tide of new visions, firing imaginative powers, optimism, and hope, and the low tide of pessimism, lament, stasis, and slow decay. 'Littoral' thus names the zone that constitutes a small segemnt of the wavering shoreline of Sydney Harbour - and an approach or attitude to change. The change in question is both geographical and technological. The technological change is perhaps best described as a change in technologies of communication. Littoral shows us a redundant system of communication, the dot/dash of morse code, caught in the flickering filaments of the new carrier of messages: fibre optics. A (nearly) dead digital language is thus carried by the newly ascendent technology of the digital. ...The dim light of the exhibition suggests the spatiality of night. With the buoys bobbing alongside us we must be in the harbour, participants in the magic of night swimming when reduced visibility accentuates the tactility of buoyancy, the touch of water upon skin becomes a caress. This experience of bathing is at once real and literal while also having more metaphorical resonances. The bathing metaphor can be used to describe our movements in the electronic matrix, movements which do not need to deny or destroy a concrete and particular location, watery or otherwise. Most importantly, the very insistence and prevalence of electronic bathing is a provocation to reimagine our relation to our environment in general: the milieu of

bathing is not an environment held at arm's length, but one in which we are immersed, we are but part of its continuous extension. excerpted from: Susan Best, 'Scales of the Sole and Littoral: Robyn Backen', Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 1998, unpag. GO HERE FOR THE 'LITTORAL' WEBSITE CV Born in 1957 in Canberra, Backen now lives and works in Sydney. Since 1980 she has exhibited extensively in Australia and Europe. Backen's work was included in the 'Australian Perspecta' exhibitions in Sydney in 1991, 1993 and 1997. She has had solo exhibitions in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, and at the Kunsthaus Rhenania Gallery in Cologne, Germany. Backen has created a number of public art commissions including projects for the Casula Powerhouse in Sydney, the Canberra Museum and Gallery, and the sculpture walk on the foreshores of Sydney Harbour. Backen has received several grants, including the 1998/99 Asialink artist's residency in India. Backen lectures at the Sydney College of the Arts and the University of Technology, Sydney. Robyn Backen is represented by Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney. littoral:text and code

EAF index PROJECTS 1996­1997­1998­1999 EXHIBITIONS 1999

universe2 robyn backen paul quinn

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archive texts chris chapman paul mccann francesca da rimini

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