Sandra Winkworth’s piece is made from detritus. But more correctly it is made from litter and imagination.
Her day begins “with morning walks spotting birds, inspecting home garden fronts and what remains after busy days and nights in the city.” And every Sunday since April those walks have been through Redfern. There was “no planed journey” instead, a “turn from laneway to road side to crossing” into memories that “revisited the streets” of “skatey/mod/rocknroll days…the 80’s”, ”the gentrified to the old school” collecting “mementos with hawk-eyed intent”. Sandra Winkworth picked up quotations from our streets then glued them into an essay with her imagination that speaks of now, memory and art.
The gems assembled into her opal like offering are grazed by speed. Flattened to perfection by the uncaring pragmatism of progress that surges along our streets. And forsaken, the once essential no longer required, abandoned beside an urgent road carelessly heading towards tomorrows dim recollection. These things are held for a moment in Sandra’s imagination, turned this way or that
then cross-referenced somehow into something with a pang of emotion that feels like places I like a lot, here and art.
So delicately and thoughtfully crafted is this piece that we need to be reminded of the time it spent on the road, as a kind of refugee from our material existence. Now with a revised citizenship of the art world it’s collective emotive power far exceeds the feeling previously accorded to any single item. Is that down to the artist’s hand - her orchestration or is she simply the conductor of an emotive coir?
This is the voice of voices, it's the Palace of Montezuma, Aztec Emperor, “he who is angry in a noble way”, it is a cloud but it is far from a miasma, it is our hope.
- Tony Twigg
