Protrusion I

Protrusion I is a self-portrait bust, rendered with a high degree of naturalism. The work depicts a male subject with a bulbous white form projecting from it nasal and oral orifices. The work forms part of the artist’s ongoing self-portraiture project, in which the tensions between objectivity and subjectivity that pervade the self-portrait as a genre are cross referenced with the notions of materiality and interiority integral to the language of sculpture. The iconography of the work parodies the connection between amorphous form and artistic subjectivity in the history of sculpture. The dough-like forms that emerge from the figure thus refer to a sense of ‘inner life’ while also operating as more analytical projections of the cavities of the bust – areas of the where the mimetic program are necessarily suspended. The result is a figure that appears to be in a state of resigned suffocation. The work was selected for the 2005 National Sculpture Prize and Exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. The work was later included in the group show Crash (and other earthy pleasures) at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery at the University of Western Australia in Perth.