Lake Fill I & II: an art performance to mark the filling of Lake Dunstan New Zealand
About this ebook
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In 1983, Lloyd Godman engaged in series of evocative photographs of the wild Clutha River which was about to be dammed and transformed into Lake Dunstan through hydro development in the ebook The Last Rivers Song.
The Lake Fill Series marks the time a decade later, when the dam was complete, the flowing waters were stalled, and the lake began to fill. Godman engaged in two performance works and the ebook documents these. Lake Wanaka and Lake Wakatipu, Queenstown New Zealand feed the powerful rivers that flow to the new lake.
Unlike most art performance works, the camera and process of taking photos was used not only as a means of documenting the performance, but as an integral part of the performance. Here the artist wired himself up to a motor drive camera in an underwater housing sitting resting in the rising water, and as part of the performance periodically touched two metal plats that fired the camera shutter. Brass metal artifacts constructed from found objects, and natural objects become part of the earth circuit the artist creates. He explores how, as humans we are part of this earth circuit. The sequence of photographs shows the rising water obliterating the vista of the landscape and lake. The last image in the sequence shows a blur of water that engulfs the scene and references a landscape lost to development. To augment this a series of earth circuit drawings and photographs of the brass artifacts are included.
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About the author
Lloyd Godman established and was head of the photographic section of the Dunedin Art School, New Zealand, for 20 years and then taught at RMIT, Melbourne, for a further 9 years. From 1989, his work moved from camera-based images to camera-less photograms with projects like Codes of Survival, Adze to Coda. He began exploring light sensitivity and evolved to where he grew images into the leaves of Bromeliad plants. Then followed a series of interactive gallery installations with plants which evolved into his current work with Tillandsias and the built environment.
He is now seen as a leading ecological artist integrating Tillandsias into the built environment in a fully sustainable manner, with The AGE newspaper referring to him as an extreme gardener.
Artist Lloyd Godman is at the forefront of a modern trend to bring an appreciation of the natural world into our structural domains. Buildings do not rest ‘above’ or ‘outside’ a landscape, separated from the surrounding environment. On the contrary, structures interact with the natural world as objects that cast shadows, consume resources and provide rich habitats for life.
Godman’s living, plant-based artworks reinforce the necessary connectedness of buildings and the wider environment. Not only do these artworks convey powerful messages and philosophies of sustainable and ethical physical interaction, but they also reach out beyond ideas to become part of the actual structure – as physical objects, Godman’s artworks are purifiers of the air as well as the soul, suppliers of colour as well as calmness, and filters of water as well as the human spirit.
...... it is highly unusual for an artist to forge new aesthetic, philosophical and architectural directions through his work; Godman, however, has managed to use his diminutive plants to convey global concepts, and in the process participate in a new wave of appreciation for plants in the built environment.
John Power
Lloyd has a Masters of Fine Art from RMIT and combines his extensive knowledge of air plants based, on his personal collection of airplants, and his photographic skills to the Tillandsimania series of EBooks.
