Gilgamesh was the historical King of Uruk in ancient Mesopotamia*.

I have reincarnated and space travelled Gilgamesh into the present day to hold two-way conversations with modern audiences.

All the sections of his face are operated manually by a person sitting inside his head, including cheeks, nose and flip top head so he can achieve a variety of human emotions and expressions.

In performance Gilgamesh talks about the joys and mistakes of his life candidly comparing them to his observations of how we live today. His comments are sure to raise a few eyebrows…. including his own!

In a beguilingly ancient way and with a heavy Iraqi accent, Gilgamesh urges us to respect each other and love our living planet.

*The story of his life was later mythologised and transcribed onto clay tablets to become “The Epic of Gilgamesh” in which he became half human and half God. It is our oldest recorded hero story and describes the King’s personal adventures and struggles with mortality that finally lead him to inner peace and wisdom.

This interactive sculptural environment explores perceptions of time and altered states of consciousness.

Various sculptural configurations and programs are used in this kinetic art work.

The following text describes one particular sculptural arrangement and sequence of events that gallery visitors to “One Breath” experienced:

Before entering through a black curtain, each gallery visitor was invited to sit in a rocking chair inside the room.

Inside, a clock with a swinging pendulum is mounted in a structure resembling a bird’s house atop a bamboo pole. The chair was positioned about twenty metres from the clock, but the viewer could observe it more closely through a pair of binoculars. (In one particular show the clock was viewed through a telescope positioned on high ground 400 metres away from it)

The sequence of events started when the viewer sat in rocking chair. Angled spot lights created moving shadows back and forth across the walls of the space.

The pendulum gradually slowed down in time with the clock’s ticking sound as if defying gravity and slowing down time itself, until both eventually came to a stop.

The visitor was left to rock in the chair accompanied by the melancholy call of a nightingale.

After a short while the pendulum and tick started to regain momentum until the clock once again functioned normally.

These impromptu in your face sculptures were set up in a busy City Mall to amuse and inform shoppers about nuclear issues.

This is a meditative walk through sculptural environment within a dedicated space set up in a theatre foyer.

Synchronised droplets of water fall into elongated pools of water lying within hanging bamboo sculptures that resemble elongated canoes.

The drip sounds gradually transform from plops and splashes into the calls of birds, frogs and other creatures.

Drip sounds are perfectly synchronised in real time via sensors to visually match each single droplet landing onto the pool’s surface.

Rainbow colours from each splash are reflected onto the surrounding walls and then beautifully overlapped by the ringlets of the next falling droplet.

The cycle of events is triggered by gallery visitors moving about within the enclosure.

This audience interactive kinetic sculpture explores human interdependence and co-operation.

It is a magical and engaging journey for small groups of people to experience together within a dedicated room.

Visitors are invited to hold hands around a waist high bamboo sculpture that triggers a sequence of event effects to start up.

However these effects can only be experienced while all participants in the room continue to hold hands with each other. If hand contact between any one of them is broken, the room lights come on and special effects stop. When everyone holds hands again the computer program will resume it’s timing sequence and continue to initiate movement and other special effects.

My human hand contact interface can be reprogrammed for different experiences and sculptures. In these photos and video the particular sequence of events occur as follows:

After the room lights dim, sounds of nature can be heard and a large pool of water mounted within the sculpture slowly starts to spin.

This rotation builds up a mirror like lens effect on the water’s surface and magnifies the reflections of all the people who are holding hands around it.

Also a reflection of the stars and moon appear on the water’s surface, having been reflected down from the ceiling above.

Documentary images from “The Art of Sport series”. Funny sports matches were played with these sculptures at community events.

This audio kinetic sculptural environment has a changing sequence of events that are initiated by the actions of gallery visitors. Here is a description the particular sequence of events shown in these photos:

A large circular clay structure stands on a wooden theatre stage.

It contains a bed of sand and the life-sized clay modelled replicas of endangered Australian animals including a Marbled Frog Mouth bird, a Marsupial Numbat and a River Blackfish. Their enlarged shadows are projected onto the surrounding walls of the gallery space.

Gallery visitors are invited to kneel on the stage to touch the bed of sand with their hands. Doing so triggers the sculpture to start a sequence of movements, sound and lighting. Visitors resemble actors on the stage.

This real time video shows the gradual appearance of recessed spiral patterns in the sand. The spiral slowly grows in length each time a visitor touches the sand.

Another special effect here was the miraculous appearance of animal paw print impressions appearing to walk across the sand like invisible or extinct animals wandering about.

This fun caricature of the “All Seeing Eye” was used for roaming outdoor performances along with his glamorous new girlfriend “Madame Medusa”.

I personally designed, then fully built this self-contained mobile theatre, including its special trailer for staging outdoor public events.

Performances have included actors, dancers, acrobats, musicians and puppeteers.

It features a kinetic tower that can be hoisted up and down from the wooden floor of the theatre after arriving at any approved outdoor site.

My kinetic sculpture of King Gilgamesh has also made appearances on this stage.

This outdoor political performance was about the struggle for East Timor’s future independence to become the newest nation in the world.

This included making these mobile stage props at short notice and personally acting as Xanana Gusmao, leader of their resistance. He later was to become the president of East Timor.

Part of my duty as an artist is to speak out in the public arena about important world events that impact adversely on our lives and our planet.

Art may provide the opportunity to tackle controversial topics in an entertaining way and engage the viewer, sometimes more effectively than a formal discussion could.