The discarded personal objects that once belonged to other people fascinate Richardson, a serial collector who frequents op shops and rubbish tips, and who browses through the hard rubbish that lines our streets. Richardson collects objects such as photographic slides, prints of snapshots, VHS cassettes, trophies, and other personal memorabilia, then uses these discarded objects for the construction of her sculptures.  

Richardson’s obsession with possessions of the “stranger” is felt throughout her sculptural forms. She sees these objects as housing parts of the identity of the previous owner, thus obtaining a sneak-peek into their world.  Her response to these objects pulls the viewer in, since the memories that she has collected could well be your own. The women in the photograph could be your mother, frozen in the motion of scoring the winning point of a tennis match. Likewise, the gold figure on the trophy could be you, now grown-up and raising your racket to equal her feat.

The body of work that Richardson exhibits for this prize continues her previous explorations into the social context of trophies and their ability to act as a form of social and personal verification. Field Study #1 (2007) is a sculpture which utilises sports trophies in a group setting similar to that of Field (2008). She has commented that this piece ‘documents an actual date and place as well as a community this unknown person was part of; it says something about the person and the community that they came from.’  

Elvis Richardson, Field, Study Number 2, Archival Pegasus Print, 100x45cm, 2008

Richardson describes her installation as a series of three works, each using different sections of the trophy:

‘The works are two sculptures and a DVD. Field uses hundreds of the figurines to form a huge crowd scene on top of an upside-down mountain. With the plastic decorations and plaques, I made an animated DVD where I scanned them in, and they scroll up the screen like movie credits. It is titled Credits. Then, I have another work where I burnt some of my silver trophies in a kiln until they started to melt and fall apart and look weird. After this, I had them re-silvered so they became these damaged trophies reinvested with a fresh poetic patina. This work is titled The Impossibility of Losing in the Mind of Someone Winning.’

Each section of Richardson’s installation explores the different aspects of trophies as a visual form.  The dissected trophies are the artist’s way of performing a forensic, clinical autopsy on the sporting ornaments, as if each one once had its own life. Richardson draws connections between the trophies and their uncanny similarity to gravestones; testaments to bygone lives.

The sculpture Field incorporates an inverted model of Mount Everest, the base on which the figurines stand en masse at eye level, commanding the attention of the viewer. Climbing the towering, haunting heights of Mount Everest remains one of those extreme physical feats for which the victor ironically does not even receive a trophy, but possibly a dislocated knee, and most defiantly an unparalleled sense of achievement. Richardson highlights that ‘for elite sports people, competing is about determination, discipline and ambition. Mount Everest is a metaphor for that.’  And on an even more personal scale, ‘metaphorically we all have our own mountains to climb.’ Richardson’s decision to resolve the presentation of the figurines by including the mountain draws heed to the core thoughts behind her works.

‘When you flip the mountain upside-down, it could be flat on the bottom, and I liked the references this created to [the phrase] “a level playing field”, a notion often used in politics as a metaphor for fairness and an equal access to opportunities to create a just society. “Everyone gets the same start on a level playing field” used to get bandied around a fair bit. But of course we aren’t on level playing fields; it is complex, but more clichés come to mind like “play the game” and “you have to be in it to win it”. Sport is really a safe arena for these notions to be played out. So I have titled it Field because of its many meanings. It is the field that we play the sport on. It is a battleground field. In painting history, the field is the flat colour behind the figure. It is an area of interest or specialisation, as in “I am an expert in my field”. There are lots of different meanings in the word that point to this kind of heroic individualist, sporting and nationalism that I am trying to combine visually with the mountain and the gold figurines playing and fighting above it like a giant Hollywood set.’

The sublime serenity of the model mountain, coupled with the stark, overproduced totems of achievement, all set upon a vast field, creates an overall visual stanza that flows between each of Richardson’s three verses. Her poetic installation exposes a different side of sporting accomplishments.  The objects we once strived so hard to obtain, which soon became meaningless pieces of dust-gathering clutter, are tenderly restored and given a new lease of life.  In this way, Richardson creates an interesting commentary on the passing glory of a single sporting moment immortalised in a frozen, gold figurine.


Marijke Davey

The Basil Sellers Art Prize, Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne,  1 August – 26 October.