THE CENTRE OF EVERYTHING
2022
REFLECTIVE ALUMINIUM SIGNAGE
SITE-SPECIFIC INSTALLATION
CREATED IN COLLABORATION
WITH DARREN ENGWIrDA
The Centre of Everything is a site-specific response created for Kyneton Contemporary Art Triennial held in Kyneton, Victoria March 19-26, 2022. It consists of three markers mapped onto the town of Kyneton: a centre, an anti-centre and an edge. These three locations exist in relation to one another; for something to have a centre, it must have an edge (and vice versa).
The three points were calculated using both geographical and population data drawn from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, weighing population density against Kyneton’s own borders. The centre is the point upon which the weight of the town is balanced; the edge is a random position taken along the town’s perimeter –– representative of the last point one encounters when crossing into, or out of, Kyneton. The definition of these points also implies their opposite: a site located as far from the centre as it is from the edge. This anti-centre is a spatial inverse –– a middle ground, an in-between.
Made remotely, The Centre of Everything is an absurdist gesture: a site-specific response to a place that the artist has never been. The placement of these signs is at once carefully plotted using a mathematically devised system and parameters, and a playful interjection in the landscape. They reveal the divide between the map and the lived experience of a place, reflecting on the character and limitations of remote connections in a time of collective isolation: a humorous yet melancholy marker of distance.
I spent a lot of time ‘driving’ around Kyneton on google maps — trying to get a sense of the place from a distance.
‘The Centre of Everything’ was made in response to the desire and failure of this mission — turning that which I could access (geographic and population data) into a site-specific response, generated from half a world away.
If the last two years have demonstrated anything, it is that boundary conditions are defined by individual and collective acts of construction — and they may (at any time) be rapidly redefined by terms both of and outside our choosing.
It is with such considerations in mind that I made these three signs denoting the centre, the edge and ‘anti-centre’ of Kyneton as determined by algorithmic computation. As absurd as they are official, I hoped they would create space to question what our centres, edges and in-between spaces are, how we recognise them, and just maybe what we’d like them to become in the future.