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Container or music series
Caravan - Return and Repeat
Wellington 2018
Rebecca Patrick
Caravan – Return and Repeat is a mobile performance work, a social sculpture, which involves the 'hacking' or occupation of urban systems to produce new experiences. The bicycle powered teardrop caravan was designed and built from scratch at home with minimal tools (a jigsaw and a drill), using the kitchen table as a saw bench, and working to a number of constraints, one of those being able to move through a domestic doorway. Throughout the duration of the Performance Arcade, the caravan will be touring the Wellington Waterfront. Dwelling involves a social process, and this work investigates the boundaries between performativity and everyday practices of citizenship. Caravan is a hybrid object, at once a sculptural prop and locus for performance, a self-contained camper, human powered, and off grid, a symbol for alternative visions and counter narratives.
“My current obsessions are wildness, wilderness exploration and play. I was born in the Manawatu and enjoyed a rural childhood. Imagination and the outdoors ran hand in hand. Whole worlds were dismantled and put back together again.”
Rebecca Patrick (MFA) is a New Zealand-based artist who works across a variety of media, including sculpture, video, installation, and performance. Rebecca’s recent art practice has involved an intensive artistic investigation of the protected green space of Wellington, the “natural” spaces that wrap around this urban “cultural capitol.” Patrick’s work offers a critique of the trope of the “man alone” in the bush evidenced in much cultural production of NZ, by scaling down notions of the heroic and monumental into the everyday and experiential, and shifting anachronistic gendered assumptions accordingly as well; instead of considering the manipulation and “conquering” of the land, reasserting a more ecological understanding of our interconnectedness with the world.
