all of a sudden

Jacqueline Bradley

Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, Gallery 2

There is a moment each season where a fruit tree turns. It is a quickening of time; a hard green peach becomes a moment of delight and then falls to the ground, beginning a slow transformation from stone to tree. This is process of replication is on repeat, a cycle within a tangle of organic, planetary, and cultural rhythms.

Our relationship with the peach is complex, abundant with histories and associations of fertility, decay, and bodily metaphor. A brief moment of release as the juice breaks through the skin; a decade spent visiting the gnarled tree in the yard; the remnants of farm gardens on stolen land. It is a tree that has shifted and changed for thousands of years, cultivating a fruit that is bruised and gone within days, exposing a stone waiting to be a plant.

all of a sudden is an installation of four elements. On the wall is a cast glass vessel made to hold a single peach, replaced as the fruit decays. Hanging over the top of a wall, a long swathe of pale pink fabric reaches to the ground and builds into a pile at the ground. On the floor, a cast glass fruit tray sits on top of timber struts, awaiting the harvest. In the far room, a collection of glass hoops hangs high on a timber hook.

Each element has a visceral materiality shared between organic bodies. The fruit in a delicate state of decay, porous fabric slumps like a skin, glass remains fluid in state between liquid and solid and timber acts as skeletal support structure. These elements are moments in a repetitive system; peaches replaced on a cycle determined by decay, fabric caught in a moment of collapse and hoops made in hot glass around a mould, repeated again and again.