Retrieve, Retreat is a sculptural collection of found and reassembled vessels composed from an array of materials – cement, wood, brick, metal, stone, glass, nails, fabric, enamel paint, ceramic shards, and other salvaged fragments. Intimate in scale and tactile in presence, these works invite touch as much as observation. Their layered surfaces – textured with coats of paint, wear, and residue – underscore their fundamentally haptic nature, calling forth the language of the hand and the memory embedded in material.
The installation evokes a flotilla, a gathering of fragmented bodies adrift yet unified, as if an improvised armada had been assembled from memory, migration, and discard. These vessels appear as floating islands—islands within islands – each one a container of layered histories and distant echoes. They do not carry cargo in the literal sense, but instead hold the accumulated weight of past lives, of dislocation and rediscovery, of things once lost and now reimagined.
At its core, Retrieve, Retreat is an act of excavation. The process begins with foraging – recovering objects discarded across Sydney’s lower north shore, particularly on the so-called “mountainous waste days” when the city’s unwanted materials are piled high on the curb. These moments of civic cleansing became moments of creative opportunity, revealing overlooked vessels and fragments that seemed to call out for revival. What others considered waste became the raw matter for rebuilding.
The yellow enamel paint used across the assemblages serves a dual purpose: it unifies the disparate textures and materials while simultaneously flattening hierarchy – each component, whether ceramic or concrete, is absorbed into a singular visual field. The result is strangely coherent yet intentionally uncanny. These are not sculptures of things, but of gestures – fragments of ruins that imply an origin, but never quite resolve into one. The work resists wholeness in favour of evocation.
Rooted in the Japanese aesthetic of mono no aware – the pathos of things, and the beauty found in impermanence and imperfection – Retrieve, Retreat dwells in the poignancy of the partial. These sculptures mourn nothing specific, yet feel memorial. Their vessel-like forms suggest function, yet carry no fixed meaning. Their fractured identities hint at a shared, unspoken ancestry, but also assert themselves as something wholly new.
The inclusion of cement is deliberate. As a building material, it speaks to ideas of permanence, construction, and modernity, but here it is reimagined as an adhesive for broken time – a substance that binds memory as much as mass. It makes visible the tension between synthetic fixity and organic decay.
Installed with the dramatic expanse of Sydney Harbour as backdrop, this body of work formed part of the North Sydney Art Prize at the historic Coal Loader site at Balls Head. Within this layered setting – where land meets water, industry meets ecology – Retrieve, Retreat found a fitting terrain: an in-between space where stories resurface, material histories overlap, and fragments are given a new kind of wholeness.
morgan veness 