A Poverty of Desire

The A Poverty of Desire project is my deeply personal way of smashing some of the dominant cliches of Western Australian life, especially the “Australia the Beautiful” myth of rural contentment and its denial of the realities of urban life.

Icons need to be broken, in my humble opinion, and this project took a serious tilt at a few of them.

A Poverty of Desire is my interpretation of the inertia and lack of desire for better things that I saw all around me, and as I made the photographs I visualized showing the project one day as a motion graphics presentation with sounds and music – filmmaking of a kind, as the means to make films were unavailable to me at the time.

POD – my nickname for A Poverty of Desire – consists of over a hundred images assembled into groups and single images, and bits of it have been shown in various art galleries around Australia, as well as art magazines.

Once I was asked to consider showing the complete project at a major Australian contemporary art museum, but I had to decline the curator’s kind offer as I didn’t have the funds to underwrite the printing, framing, installation and other costs. I do hope that some day soon Australian art museums will adopt the sensible policies of their European sisters, of underwriting artists’ exhibition costs as well as paying an honorarium, to help defray an art career’s considerable costs that are rarely if ever underwritten by sales of the work itself.

Many in the art world consider POD to be a landmark project of Western Australian contemporary art, and in WA itself it was seen by many in the art world there as an influential one.

Here is a small POD subset. Click the thumbnails to download each PDF.