To celebrate his new self-released LP Funeral Mutes,
Francis Plagne will perform in the homely surrounds of Eastmint
Studios, Northcote on Saturday the 9th of January, accompanied by Ben
Bourke on bass, Alex Garsden on guitar, James Rushford on keyboard and
Joe Talia on drums.
Also on the bill: a rare Australian duo
performance by Oren Ambarchi and Crys Cole; textural keyboard hermit Tim
Coster; and Mad Nanna string squeezer Pat O'Brien.
Antony Riddell: Fingerprints on the Surface of the Brain
Performance Program: Saturday Sep 12, 2pm Antony
Riddell will perform and read from his various writings with musical
accompaniment from Rosalind Hall, Francis Plagne, Samaan Fieck, Dave
Brown and Christopher LG Hill.
Liquid Architecture presents Fingerprints on the Surface of the Brain, the first ever solo exhibition by the artist, writer and musician Antony Riddell.
Originally from Adelaide, Riddell moved to Sydney in the early 1980s
where he connected with a lively underground scene of artists, punks and
other experimenters. His early band Nada shared stages with the likes
of The Laughing Clowns, The Triffids, Jon Rose, Fetus Productions, God
Meat God, Carnival Headgash, Browning Mummery and more.
Then, in 1985 Riddell suffered a life-altering accident. Falling
through the roof of a Redfern squat, he sustained serious brain injuries
that would permanently affect his balance, speech and movement.
Riddell’s remarkable artistic works since that moment bear the mark of,
and also self-consciously confront, what he has called the “fingerprints
on the surface of the brain”.
Following studies at the Sydney College of the Arts in the late
1980s, making ‘monstrous’ sculptures in clay and concrete, Riddell moved
on to Melbourne. In 1991 he formed the group Volvox, with Dave Taskas
of legendary punks Grong Grong and noise artist Glenn Normann. Operating
as the project’s frontman (under the pseudonym Lester Vat), Riddell
delivered extraordinary and profoundly influential performances — his
aggressive physical impropriety and neurologically-disordered vocals sat
alongside other lyrical interventions, simultaneously absurd, yet
strangely elegant. Despite never playing outside Melbourne, Volvox made a
lasting impression in Australia and beyond. Musician and ‘What Is
Music?’ founder Oren Ambarchi characterised the band as “outside of
everything” while Bananafish’s Tom Smith judged them “worth the lives of
ten thousand Cobains”.
Beyond musical performance, Riddell developed a prodigious writing
and drawing practice, which he continued following Volvox’s dissolution
in the mid-1990s, generating countless artist books, many published on
his own imprint Meniscus. His texts — typically hand-drafted in
miniscule barely-legible cursive script, and later transcribed to
computer — narrate uncanny and irrational stories marked by surrealist
wordplay. Riddell’s illustrations manifest as fine line-drawings and
cartoons using felt-tip pen on art paper, and typically depict
anthropomorphised organisms, animals and brains in various states of
relation.
