Artists statement

'Bathtub Analogy' is a performance lecture about altered plant growth, landfill chemistry and quarrying at the Darebin Parklands and across Naarm/Melbourne. The work is structured like a fasciated sheoak tree, accumulated cells growing in a twisted spiral. The text tells the story of the artist’s encounter with the park and its chemical history through a conversation with the park ranger, Pete. The work moves between scales – considering histories of extraction and waste management across the city and then zooms in to consider the microscopic relationships between molecules in the water, soils and plants. Rhythm is created by the cycle of images, the shifting scale of attention and the artist’s voice as she reads the text.

A cycle of images of the Darebin parklands now and over the last 135 years by the artist, from archives, and local photographer Michael Oxer and images of a Cleanaway landfill site in Ravenhall, cellular structure of plants from textbooks and online sources are played on a rhythmic loop to form and reform relationships with the voiced text. The work runs for approximately 35 minutes. 

'Bathtub Analogy' was developed for a symposium alongside an installation of sculptural works first shown at West Space as part of 'Stranger than Fiction' curated by Joanna Kitto. 'Tip Test' (2024) installed across the southern windows of the gallery was a long piece of sprung metal unfurled and secured with brackets to the wall. There were three works-on-paper mounted with magnets to the steel. Each of these is an oversized, horizontal litmus test of the leachate ponds at the Parklands. These works were produced by impregnating paper with PH sensitive dye before they were dipped on site into the ponds. Two small ziplock bags of steel and bluestone swarf and an inverted photograph by local photographer Michael Oxer of the Parklands before it was replanted in 1980 hang from the metal and surrounding architecture. The other work, 'Total Dissolved Solids', is a collection of 8 chrome hubcaps from cars produced between the 1950s-70s. The hubcaps are suspended and connected with magnets by threaded steel in the form of a chromium compound molecule, a substance that 'Bathtub Analogy' elaborates on, that has been found in the soil at the Parklands.

Artist Bio

Rosie Isaac is an artist, writer, radio broadcaster and teacher based in Naarm. The act of reading – silently, aloud, to someone or together – comes up again and again in her writing and sculptures.