At the 2011 Swell Sculpture Festival Public Art Forum the term appropriation will be explored with reference to the use of borrowed elements in the creation of a new work or to the new work itself.

 

Art practices involve the 'appropriation' of ideas, symbols, artefacts, image, sound, objects, forms or styles from other cultures, from art history, from popular culture or other aspects of man made visual or non visual culture. How does appropriation form the meaning and the language of the artwork? And does it affect the source? Is appropriation copying, stealing or creating new meaning?

Practising artist, Erika Mayer and Site Curator, Dev Lengjel will look at issues of appropriation; authenticity and ownership in historical and local context through a study of authenticity and ownership both in historical context and in local Australian context. They will explore appropriation as a method of developing new forms of representation and meaning, questioning how does an arts worker and a practicing artist view the notion of appropriation?

 

Dr. Tim Humphrey from Griffith University will talk of borrowed sound and the democratic artwork; Case Studies in Contested Sound Histories.  Soundscape composition is always an appropriation. A paradigm for ethically gathered and sound artworks is suggested by a recent project at Bermagui on the New South Wales South Coast. The democratic distribution of sound gathering is augmented by archival and compositional options for the gatherers of sound. 

 

Carla van Laar will invite consideration on how we make meaning through our multi-sensory embodiment and questions how it would be possible to not appropriate.