Cassandra Hard Lawrie

University of Western Sydney - UWS Art Gallery
Wunderkammer | 9 July – 21 September 2007

I am interested in what is shared without reliance on language and what traverses the constructed boundaries of individual cultures.

For me the ‘esoteric’ symbolises the opposition of insider/outsider and familiar and unfamiliar. The uninformed viewer is ‘outside’ the secret coding of the esoteric image, yet as an historic referent it is familiar at a deeper level of the psyche. The ‘renaissance wunderkammer’ represents an intuitive and indiscriminate approach to collecting, before the slavish approach of classification developed in the collections of the Enlightenment. As a home for predominantly the ‘rare’ object, the wunderkammer represented an embracement of diversity. The idea of the ‘historical displacement of meaning’ (and the displaced semantic image) symbolises the inevitability of change, and that what we know to be familiar today will shift soon thereafter. All three subjects can celebrate the notion of diversity, transformation and what can be understood without reliance on the superficially familiar - and this is symbolic of the transient experience of the multi-cultural communities of Western Sydney of the twenty-first century. Ultimately, the imagery of esoteric doctrine, the wunderkammer and the displaced semantic image can offer a symbolic discourse on the nature of ‘belief’. A place under transformation challenges the systems of belief of both those that enter the ‘place’ and those that understood that ‘place’ in its former nature. Such a place is Western Sydney.