ChatterShapes was commissioned for the Edinburgh International Festival for the exhibition ‘Enlightenments’, and exhibited in the corridors of Dean Gallery at the National Gallery Scotland. Titled after an album by Melbourne post-punk band, The Moodists (1979-1986) the drawing is over 30 metres in length, and comprises approximately 200 individual drawings.
The work is a panorama of Edinburgh and in this installation creates a horizon line around the gallery walls. However, as well as evoking landscape traditions it is also a portrait of a city, and as such represents Creek’s experience of Edinburgh - his research, encounters and responses to place, its history and people.
CHATTERSHAPES
mixed media, text on paper, 9 wall sections 70 x 31,400 cm
Chattershapes, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. 2009 (installation view).
palinode
charmed celebrity
naive and unruly children
elites at play
deep time vindicated
grotesque economies
mechanism of gardens
travels to imagined shaddowworlds
palinode
EXHIBITION PROVENANCE
2019 Paper Walls. Glen Eira Art Gallery, Australia.
2015 The Desktop Drawings. Shepparton Art Museum, Australia.
2010 freehand: recent Australian drawing. Heidi Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne.
2013 ChatterShapes. RMIT University, Melbourne.
2009 The Enlightenments. National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, UK.