Precious Stone

Objects are often valued based on how they are imbued with meaning. That meaning can be influenced by culture, history, religion, sentiment or rarity. My work explores this with a piece of Sydney sandstone. By removing the sandstone from one context and presenting it in another, it starts to take on new meaning. That meaning is open for the viewer to contemplate. For me, links are made to Sydney’s natural environment; the Gadigal people; European settlers; the family home where I raised my children. Ultimately, it’s about a narrative and as such temporality is an intrinsic property of the piece of sandstone. The stone is suspended using a single red cord, so equilibrium, balance and engagement with gravity are at play. Red is symbolic of value. The cord is the connection to time, in a way suspending it, allowing us to interpret the sandstone’s significance.