Meeandip/Garden Island
Although visible from the mainland, as a naval base, Meeandip/Garden Island is mostly inaccessible to the public. For this exhibition, I wanted to make works that reflected this proximate distance and had a sense of inaccessibility. The Submarine Escape Training Facility, the only one in Australia, is a tall concrete tower with a Brutalist aesthetic built at the south end of the island. Inside the building is a 22-meter escape training tank, designed to provide trainee submariners the experience of emerging through the hatch of a distressed submarine into the tower of water above. I was interested in the form and function of this tank designed to simulate an escape from an object that is designed to be invisible, on an island that is visible but distant. The drawing is made using white pencil on a dark surface, bringing the cylindrical form from darkness. The frottage is a rubbing of a hatch from the bottom of the escape tank.