PROFILING CDU ARTISTS: IAN HANCE

Ian Hance is a PhD candidate in visual arts at CDU. His work will be part of the Spectacular Failures exhibition in the Nan Geise Gallery during the Darwin Festival. Ian writes:

My PhD visual arts project was initiated by my observations of a phenomenon that I had first noticed occurring along the highways of Northern Australia. In many parts of the tropical north and the ‘Top End’ there are large termite mounds (sometimes called ant-hills) built onto the landscape that have been dressed or decorated. The visual result of many of these ‘dressings’ was eye-catching and strange. Often shapes that defied our ideas of ‘humanness’ were being pressed into discarded clothing, provoking humour and obvious sight gags invited by the form, but also recalling the deeply uncanny nature of the non-human and the monstrous. I wanted to understand the cultural significance of these structures, and then to consider my own position as I interpreted meanings from them in the creation of my own Artworks. Therefore, I needed to conduct data collection to map out the kinds of dressed up termite mounds that appeared along the major highways. To do this, I undertook eleven road trips along the three major highways, the Stuart, Barkly and Victoria Highways, across a three-year period (the beginning of 2015 to the beginning of 2018), recording the dressed-up mounds both with photography and video (Fig. 1). The exhibition is entitled TER(MITE MOUN)D : Painting the Humorous Kitschgrotesque of the Roadside Dressed-up Termite Mounds of Tropical Australia.

Figure 1 (pictured above): Through my painting-led research, I addressed a number of questions concerning the concepts of humour as they pertain to the psyche of the population of tropical northern Australia. I concluded that through the lens of the kitsch grotesque, I could express a unique humour that combined notions of the uncanny and the abject: a humour that involved irony and the absurd that often alluded to spectacular failures relating to the challenges of the tropical north (Fig. 2).”

Figure 2 (pictured above): Concurrently with this exhibition, Ian is holding an exhibition/installation in the WWII Oil Storage Tunnels in Darwin, of paintings developed during his candidature. There will be an opening on Sunday the 12th August 2018 and the exhibition runs until the 26th. Opening hours are the same as the normal opening hours of the tunnels where the regular information about the tunnels and displays are on show. The normal charge for viewing the tunnels apply.