Emi­ly Floyd | Cir­cles of dialogue

This exhi­bi­tion takes as its point of depar­ture Dia­logue of cir­cles by Inge King (1915 – 2016), a sin­gu­lar work in the La Trobe Uni­ver­si­ty Art Col­lec­tion. King’s site-spe­cif­ic steel sculp­ture is sit­u­at­ed with­in the moat at the Mel­bourne (Bun­doo­ra) Cam­pus, just south of its cen­tre, the Ago­ra. Since its instal­la­tion in 1976, the work has func­tioned as both land­mark and back­drop for pub­lic gath­er­ings and per­for­mances in the Moat Theatre.

The exhi­bi­tion Cir­cles of dia­logue invites a gath­er­ing of con­tem­po­rary artis­tic respons­es that cen­tre the body, as a con­tain­er of mem­o­ries and expe­ri­ences, in rela­tion to mon­u­men­tal works of pub­lic art and their mate­ri­al­ist his­to­ries. The art­works on dis­play respond to the dynam­ic spir­it of King’s sculp­tures from the 1970s, which were intend­ed to medi­ate between the body of the view­er and the sur­round­ing envi­ron­ment. The exhi­bi­tion enfolds King’s mod­ernist lega­cy into a broad­er dia­logue that encom­pass­es First Nations and colo­nial mem­o­ry, mate­r­i­al con­ser­va­tion and bod­i­ly archives.

The exhi­bi­tion inverts King’s orig­i­nal title, open­ing an exchange on geo­met­ric form and gram­mar and propos­ing new per­spec­tives, con­ver­sa­tions and inter­pre­ta­tion. King, a Euro­pean post­war migrant, teacher and mem­ber of the artist group Cen­tre Five, is renowned for her for­mal sculp­tures across pub­lic spaces in Mel­bourne. She is one of few female artists in an art form dom­i­nat­ed by men. King’s influ­ence can be traced through the prac­tice of con­tem­po­rary artists such as, in this exhi­bi­tion, Emi­ly Floyd and Augus­ta Vinall Richardson.

Artists: Diana Bak­er Smith, Lor­raine Con­nel­ly-Northey, Zoë Crog­gon, Dean Cross, Narelle Desmond, Emi­ly Floyd, Inge King, Sri­whana Spong, Augus­ta Vinall Richard­son. Cura­tor: Amelia Wallin