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'Colin Duncan
has made elaborate furniture (seats and ornamental
frames for mirrors) from plain packaging cardboard. The
objects seem to anticipate the presence of a viewing subject
and act like parodic tributes to the vanity of visual
privilege.'
© Susan Fereday, ruins in
reverse, catalogue, 1996, RMIT Gallery
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Untitled © Colin
Duncan 1996
Cardboard, Hot Glue / Dimensions Variable.
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Sleeplessness © Colin Duncan
1998
Video, Paper, Polystyrene, MDF / Dimensions Variable.
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Store © Colin
Duncan 1993
Cardboard / Dimensions Variable.
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Box © Colin Duncan 1991
Cardboard, Llighting / Dimensions Variable.
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Death © Colin Duncan 1994
Cardboard,Llighting / Dimensions Variable.
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'the landscape
of my days appears to be composed, like mountainous
regions, of varied materials heaped pell-mell. There I
see my nature, itself composite, made up of equal parts
of instinct and training. Here and there protrude the
granite peaks of the inevitable, but all about is rubble
from the landslips of chance. I strive to retrace my life
to find in it some plan, following a vein of lead, or
of gold, or other course of some subterranean stream,
but such devices are only tricks of perspective in the
memory. From time to time, in an encounter or an omen,
or in a particular series of happenings, I think that
I recognize the workings of fate, but too many paths lead
nowhere at all, and too many sums add up to nothing.'
© Marguerite Yourcenar / Memoirs
of Hadrian
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Well © Colin Duncan 1993
Cardboard, Llighting / Dimensions Variable.
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Well © Colin Duncan 1993
Cardboard, Lighting / Dimensions Variable.
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Towering up, one on top of the other,
balanced miraculously like an old stonewall without visible
means of support, Duncan's boxes make the interior and
the exterior form of a water-well and a light-well. A
newly hollowed out space in the already excavated spot
of the landscape which has made way for the gallery. In
allusionistic terms, an emptied-out space as well as a
filled-up space, simultaneously void and plentiful. Duncan
purposely pushes the essentialism of his chosen media.
He relies upon the inherent material histories contained
in his paper products - that the original source: trees;
of the ingredients which transform tree pulp to paper;
water; of the inherent organic matter of these cardboard
things which turn and return to their place of origin:
the landscape.
© Juliana Engberg /
well / 1993
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