Projects

Roget's Circular 1999-2001

Lisa Roberts and Melissa Smith have adopted their own definition of Roget's categories under the headings of child, portrait, still life, letter, landscape and garden. Art is language and they each use imagery in their own way. Melissa's prints are counterpointed by Lisa's pastels, digital prints and oil paintings. The works reference many interwoven subjects and themes: imagination and memory, landscape, personal identity, family history, time, cycles and seasons.

Rachael Hogge
Community Programs Officer
University of Tasmania
North-West Centre. 2002

The project evolved out of a year long correspondence between Melissa Smith (MS) and myself (LR) between 1999 and 2000. We travelled through landscapes of our forebears, sometimes together, but mostly independently, collecting letters, photos, recipes, drawings, songs, anecdotes, locks of hair, etc. from the past and present.

The stuff we collected fell naturally into categories. Inspired by the six categories of Roget's original Thesaurus, we named ours thus:

Existence
Portrait

Space
Landscape

Matter
Still life

Intellect
Garden

Volition
Child

Affections
Letter

We chronicled our journeys through email messages reconstructed from actual events. Composing with words, pictures, sounds and animation, we each aimed to capture particular responses to experience. A key word was chosen to identify each message. Sometimes our key words might be the same, but our meanings, reflected through choice and positioning of the material, would be different.

In Janurary 1999 I was in Adelaide visiting my daughter, and in Melbourne visiting my son. Many things happenedduring that time which seemed significant. I composed six messages- one for each category - with the material gathered at that time.

I wanted to say something about Repton, who I had just discovered in Adelaide's Barr Library. English landowners in other countires (like Australia) would employ him to transform the local landscape into a romantic image of their homeland. I was interested in the struggle our forbears had in seeing the Australian landscape as its own place, and not through English eyes. This idea fell naturally into 'landscape'. Over the top of the image of Repton's scene I animated the signature (or mark) of Hannah Brown, who may or may not have been an Aboriginal woman.

Meanwhile, Melissa was visiting her father-in-law in Ararat.
She captured something of his mood through her drawing of the surrounding land, and a word picture. The play on 'long' through image and word, suggests the panorama of his life.

THE INTERACTIVE FRAMEWORK

A circle of shards can be seen amongst this selection of objects. These are buttons leading to the six categories. They number from the top and continue in a clockwise direction:

The other items are buttons to other places. For example the coiled leaf leads you to directly to the entrance to space/landscape. I found this leaf while walking through some virgin bush in Nabowla, northern Tasmania.

A calendar interconnects with six categories of memorabilia. The first letter of each month provides a button into that time.

The maze drawn in 1993 and used in the interactive works Terra Incognita and Lillie's Time Piece, was used to build hyperlinks between the email messages, the calendar and the six categories.