Georgia Lucy

This Project was commissioned by Constance ARI for a publication for their 5 year anniversary of being an offsite gallery. Selected artists were asked to respond to the theme The Page as a Site. Each artist was to fill the brief with content amounting to an A4 page colour spread.

My interest in iconoclasm found me imagining the contents of the pages held by statues of colonists and kings in Franklin Square. My main focus was William Crowther. From observation the seagulls won’t even shit on him.

William Lodewyk Crowther was the 14th premier of Tasmania. Crowther was a man of science, a doctor and surgeon as well as a keen amateur naturalist. He pursued this passion by trapping birds and animals, killing them and collecting their skins. He had many business interests including sawmills, guano, sealing and whaling, not to mention a political career.

Today he is infamously remembered as a brute responsible for the mutilation of palawa man William Lanne aka King Billy. This information is absent from the statue and in stead it perpetuates “the memory of long and zealous political and professional service in this colony”. Thinking about Crowther’s page led me to a library founded in his name: the Crowther Collection in the State Library.

I submitted a page with a link that led to a digital work. This work then had another link which led to a sound file imagining Crowther as a bird-poo man chimera.

The three works can be viewed here.

Willy’s page. What is it? What’s written there? And why is there poo on eddie and John, but none on Willy?

After researching in the public dimension of a private collection: (The Crowther library). I have compiled key elements into 1 page. His story…in his hand.
In the transpositional style of the surgery of Dr Willy Crowther’s himself…. remixing it. here are my findings.

Quoted from the intro in the following audio file