Sensing beauty/sensing difference Caloundra Regional Art Gallery 2002
Grapple residency Ross Barber/Bonnie Jenkins

Our response to the residency three graces and the shade goes to the heart of Sensing beauty/sensing difference and has much to do with the relationship of artists and people experiencing disabilities to the built environment, the gallery, art history and social norms. The history of the three graces idealised women's bodies representing three ideal virtues) is as old as classical relief sculpture embedded in architecture in which the representation of the ideal body was expected, not a real body as we might see in the mirror or every day life. The three graces represented the ideality of perfection of human form both in mind and body. In the 19th century Rodin of course took hold of this convention and turned it on its head in his unfinished work The Gates of Hell part of a series of work based on Dante’s The Divine Comedy. He substituted a male body modeled from life and repeated it unchanged three times, naming it the three shades as a parodic quotation of the classical form and firmly placed the ‘modern’ figure of the existential human being before us.

The works Bonnie Jenkins and I have made quote the conventions of the classical relief in architecture, the images are of the unexpected ‘disabled bodies’ I alluded to above represented in three filmic layers embedded in gridded boxes mimicking modernist architecture. Liz, Julie and Jane 30x20cms each are the three graces, they represent a different kind of viewer/observer, subtle, ones who must be looked for, Graham larger than life the shade 150x105cms is both viewer from his monumental positioning and easily viewed by us.

The placement of all the figures in this place implies no hierarchic ordering of importance, each of the graces and the shade are here as artists and commentators on art and people of considerable power.