ATER ORKS

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Jennifer Turpin began working with water in 1988 and it has become the motivating force and

major feature of her sculptures and installations ever since.

It's incidental the way it began,' says Turpin in her office within sight and sound of Sydney Harbour, the inspirational background to much of her work. 'One waterpiece led to another and another. I'm interested in incorporating things from the natural world in a cultural arena .'

Water . The essence of life. Holy spirit of baptism, fountain of youth, font of wisdom, sacred spring, wishing well, pool of reflection: water has been a living metaphor of human consciousness, vitality and spirituality throughout history and in all human cultures. Water is fundamental, therefore, not only to biological life, but to spiritual and psychic life as well.

George Seddon recently pointed out that, even in the modern age of electricity and computers, ordinary everyday language favours a hydraulic model for talking about human emotions: bottling up, overflowing, damming up. He asks why the 'hydraulic metaphor', as he calls it, is taken so seriously in our thinking.

'The answer must be in part that it was popularised by Descartes [in the 17th century] and that it was revived in our own century by figures [such as] Freud. [But] we are still left with the question of why Descartes and Freud turned so readily to hydraulic models. Part of the answer can be found in the history of technology. Water power is as old as the Nile. The civilizations of the Mediterranean basin-the Mesopotamian, the Egyptian and the Roman-were predominantly hydraulic cultures. It is therefore that Galen's synthesis of classical neurobiology drew naturally upon the reservoirs, aqueducts, fountains, baths and sewers of the Greco-Roman world.'

However, this ancient fascination with water was not limited to extensive urban plumbing and the Archimidean screw. Hydraulic automata-elaborate water-powered machines that played out mythical fantasies-were

widespread in antiquity. In these hydraulic-mechanical wonders, statues moved, cymbals crashed, cups overflowed and temple doors opened spontaneously, all mysteriously powered by water magic . From the 14th century on there was a revival of these classical water-powered automata. In Europe, water continued to flow through the artistic imagination from the magnificent water gardens of the 17th and 18th centuries, typified by the fountains of Versailles, to the 19th century love affair with romantic landscapes featuring watery arbors, grottos and waterfalls.

While Jennifer Turpin's waterworks to date intersect with this artistic tradition and have unmistakable Neoclassical, Romantic and even Baroque resonances, they are anything but traditional in concept and form. From a random-motion, water-driven pseudomachine to a room full of droplet-tinkling harp-like screens, Turpin's pieces push water into new, exciting areas of expression. On the one hand, her waterworks have a strongly seductive physical presence; on the other, they are bold, intellectually and aesthetically pleasing statements of ideas and explorations of the physics of water.

After fine arts at Sydney University, Turpin continued her studies in sculpture and drawing at art schools in Italy and London in the early eighties. This period of training exposed her to Baroque and Renaissance art and left a lasting impression, especially in terms of an abiding affection for 'dark, romantic places'-a romantic streak akin to the 18th century love of ruins, she says-and notions of nature intruding on or invading high-art architectural spaces .

In 1985, Turpin worked with an experimental group of performance artists in London called Station House Opera. 'It was very daring physical work, building things on stage with concrete blocks and then knocking them down again. I was involved in one of those pieces, workshopping and performing, and that had a strong effect on the way I started thinking about manipulating sculptural objects in space.

'With this performance element influencing her outlook, Turpin returned to study visual arts at Sydney College of the Arts. Her first water-animated work came about, fortuitously, as a result of working on a site-specific installation on a pier at Walsh Bay for her graduate exhibition in 1988 .

Leading up to this event, Turpin's installation work was already evidencing a liquidity and lightness which were to inform her later work . 'Drawers of Water',

water, timber, fibreglass, brass, 1990 (collection BP Melbourne)

'Water Works I', John Heine Foundry, for Vault 1990, 5m x 1 .2m, water , nylon threads, steel tank

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'Tower of Babble' was a witty visual pun on a monumental scale: a four metre high twisted stack of newspaper that resembled a giant column of stone. 'Without the Walls' played with notions of inner and outer space and was based on a series of charcoal drawings of the interior of Woolloomooloo wharf. In these 'brick walls' the viewer could make out figures taken out of context from Baroque and late Renaissance paintings. The whole environment was set up like a crenellated garden wall and dimly lit by a central chandelier . In 1988, '2D or not 2D' challenged the viewer's perceptions with a peephole vision of a room immersed in a watery blue light and containing ladders and chairs suspended at strange angles in mid-air. The overwhelming impression was of an underwater world of floating objects.

It was 'Shifting Ground' for the 1988 graduation show at the Walsh Bay pier which introduced the element of water into her work for the first time. A float tank in the water below the wharf was the 'engine' of the piece connected by a cable to the workings of the installation above deck. An ornate old lift cage was the central feature, a fixed structure braced by upside-down pine trees, gilded with gold leaf, on beds of newspaper. The cable went up through this structure, attached to an inverted chair inside the cage, and was then connected by a series of pulleys in the roof to a chair bolted to the floor. 'Whenever there was any movement on the water, caused by the tide or passing boats, the float tank would go up and down and as a consequence the whole structure of ladders would concertina in and out and screech and lurch in the most ridiculous way,' explained Turpin.

In 1990, Turpin embarked on a more ambitious work that experimented with controlling the peculiar properties of water : 'The Water Works I'. This piece sought to create an unnervingly beautiful effect of slowly descending droplets on a series of wires. It was presented as part of a group show, Vault, at the John Heine Sheet Metal Foundry in Leichhardt .

'The Water Works I' was the first in a series designed to explore the effects of controlling myriad tiny droplets of water. 'This was the first piece using nylon fishing line . I used simple materials, like plastic pipe and garden fittings .. . It was the first time I had used water in an architectural environment and it was exciting.

'The critical thing about 'The Water Works I' and subsequent waterworks is that the water is not doing what you normally expect it to do. Water is formless and you expect it just to slip between your fingers, falling with gravity . This water does everything that it shouldn't do. It falls in little droplets and very slowly. It defies gravity because all the lines are slightly tapered. And it makes very little sound . I was interested in subtly manipulating a natural expectation. These works really play with gravity and surface tension.'

Also in 1990, Turpin produced a whimsical piece entitled 'Drawers of Water', an absurdly tall (three and a half metres) chest of drawers with a brass pump handle and a set of open drawers from which water spills in a long cascade from top to bottom. In this work, nature, in the form of a waterfall, meets a domestic object. 'These drawers are full of water,' explained Turpin, 'You pump it by hand and the excess water overflows the drawers for three or four minutes. Then it remains motionless until somebody decides to enliven it again by pumping it up.

'This lumbering object is there waiting for this brief moment when it takes off. It's an overbearing and painstakingly built piece until that moment when the water flows. Then it becomes a much more poetic object.' Bought by BP in Melbourne as a feature for the foyer of their office building, 'Drawers of Water' is now looking for a new home as the current owners cannot accommodate its height in their new premises.

In 1991, Turpin exhibited 'The Water Works II' for the postgraduate show in the final year of her diploma in visual

arts. This was a more refined version of the shaft of watery light in a dark space than 'The Water Works I'. The lines were angled to create a shape like a shaft of light from the heavens.

Turpin's best known work to date, 'The Water Works Ill' was located in the vestibule of the Art Gallery of New South Wales for the 1991 Australian Perspecta. It was so well received by critics and gallery-going public alike, that it remained in situ for six months. It was in fact two pieces: a tapering column and a split, gently parting curtain of slowly descending water­droplets on wire-frames, installed on either side of the neoclassical sandstone antechamber of the Gallery.

The elegant circular pool, surround railing and overhead pipes of the column and the troughs and pipes of the curtain were all made of copper which was the only suitably strong plumbing material for the long span of the overhead pipes, but which also complemented the warm tones of the sandstone.

For a short while, the sober atmosphere of this neoclassical space was filled with an aura of light and mystery; the niches for busts looked like specially carved scalloped shells and the watery light played on pillar and vault, transforming the space into a fairy grotto.

While 'The Water Works' series draws inspiration from nature and may even be said to quote the effects of rain or waterfalls, the works are not merely imitations of nature or artistic improvements on nature. 'I'm constantly faced with this dilemma : why make art that's to do with nature when really you could go on a bushwalk?' Turpin asks. 'I justify things by saying that the water pieces that I've done are seductive in their effect. What I'm trying to do is give people the time and space through a contemplative atmosphere-albeit in an unusual and artifical way-to make their own connections with either their own thoughts or the natural world.

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'The important thing is not what these works look like, but what it feels like to be there . They're very much experience-based work. It is not purely a visual or an intellectual experience, but it's aural and ambient and sensory in other ways as well.'

A series of tall, harp-like screens tinkling thousands of droplets in a large white, wooden-floored room, 'The Water Works IV' at Annandale Galleries in Sydney was an even more intimate and all-embracing experience and worked closely with the site which Turpin chose specifically for this project. 'It was much more spatially free in the sense that you could walk right amongst these curtains of water. This piece was particularly related to the architectural space. I wanted to work with the idea of trying to make the polished wooden floor float. So the reflections of the water on the polished timber were designed to liquefy the air and float the floor .

'All these works are monumental in scale because they're so tall, but in substance they barely exist. They're very delicate, very light. With 'The Water Works IV', because it was a much quieter space than the Art Gallery of New South Wales, I really wanted people to have that experience of walking around these things that were defining the space. At a certain point all you saw was one line and that idea of it being there and then not being there and shifting with your perspective was something I wanted to play around with.'

Apart from the mysterious, intangible quality of 'being there', the other aspect of the work missing from these photographs is the delicate, subtle sound of water.

'It's almost nothing, almost silent. In fact, that's also what these works are about from my point of view. They do make a quiet sound of very fine water droplets falling, but I'm really concerned about our aural environment. I feel there is just nowhere you can go in a public arena where you're not bombarded by someone's idea of what you should be listening to. It makes me intensely angry because I think it's an invasion of people's minds

and it's really all about control; a real manipulation of potential creative thinking-a very Fascist bombardment.'

Working with water brings its own peculiar challenges . 'Unlike for architects who can design to scale on paper or models, with water you must work fullscale because you can't reduce the size of the water molecule. You have to set something up and see what the water will do.

'To make the Annandale Galleries piece, there was endless experimentation, trying different size nozzles, different pressures, different angles of the pipe, of the lines, grading the size of the apertures of the nozzles in order to slow down the water. Then when you turn the light on it, in one way it looks different, so it's all fine­tuning. There has to be that hands-on approach. And then you make a mistake and something fabulous happens. You think 'that's much better than I ever could have thought!' I guess that's the joy of working, of being an artist of any kind.'

In 1990, a collaboration with architect James Grose for 'Synthesis 6'-an exhibition of collaborative works between artists and architects at the Maritime Services Bond Store beside Sydney Harbour-produced 'In the Hoise Shaft'. 'We were asked to do site-specific works that responded to the building. We chose the hoist shaft which is a drop four floors down, with a hole cut in each floor. We built a platform of steel square pipes at the top of the shaft that you could stand on and we had water falling down from underneath the rungs-free-falling. You looked down and it was black because we blocked off all the light from the floors below. And the water at the bottom was very dimly lit. You couldn't see its edges or where it escaped. You could have been looking into the Tank Stream or some hidden spring or the harbour itself. It was very mysterious.

'I'm very interested in the idea of nature invading a human construction. In an aesthetic way, James and I were working on the idea of the introduction of the natural element into the architectural space . My idea was

slightly different to his-more to do with nature undermining the certainty of human structures. I'm always working with the nature-culture dyad. 1

In 1993 came a commission that has taken Turpin in a very different direction . This new work will be a showpiece on the foreshores of her beloved Sydney Harbour-a festive pink, pontooned, serpentine floating bridge at the northern entrance to the newly refurbished Luna Park. At the time of writing, the design plans for the Park were still under wraps, but suffice to say the bridge will be a sculptural pun on the idea of a 'foot' bridge on an absurdly monumental scale to complement the huge face at the opposite, southern end of the Park, keeping the fun spirit of the nearby neo-art deco Coney Island building.

The bridge itself will be a floating S­shaped walkway, underpinned by a 60 metre long high-strength steel tube, but sensitive to the rocking motions of tide and boat-wash as well as the weight and motion of pedestrians. While it is obliged to satisfy all the necessary safety requirements, this plump, fleshy, crazy-curved bridge will be part fun-ride as well as conventional walkway.

Largescale civic commissions are a new and challenging area for the gallery artist, but Turpin revels in this larger canvas for her talents. In the pipeline are projects for the Brisbane airport foyer and public works for the Liverpool-Campbelltown Council.

Turpin sees Australia as a particularly suitable context for water as part of public life and culture for several reasons. 'To use water in other ways that are playful or visual or symbolic in

'Water Works IV', Annandale Galleries, 1992, 8 units each 4 .5m x 3m x200mm

a cultural area is just reinforcing the natural, fundamental need for water at a physiological level. Water has been abused, made sacred, everything-the full gamut-and in Australia I think we need to focus on water. We have a problem with water-keeping our water clean, recycling it, not wasting it and so on-and I can only think that working with water in a thoughtful, metaphoric and aesthetic way draws people's attention to it.'

Julian Leatherdale

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