SNOWMAN KILLER: A JOURNEY AROUND AUSTRALIA IN SEARCH OF ANSWERS

Presented by Clare McCracken

Hosted by Benalla Art Gallery
26/09/2020
Talk #95

Snowman Killer - the big carrot and Big Ned, 2017. Photograph by Andrew Ferris

CLARE McCRACKEN Presents: “Snowman Killer: a journey around Australia in search of answers.”

In the early 1980s Clare McCracken’s father took the Myrtleford Shire to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal, contesting the proposed construction of a 17-metre concrete snowman. The fight over the giant snowman was lengthy and vicious: a conflict that gave McCracken her first nickname – “Snowman Killer” – which plagued her early years of school. This performance lecture combines the archive from the original snowman controversy, McCracken’s memories of the ordeal and diary snippets from a 7500 km road trip the artist took with a big carrot – a to-scale representation of the nose of the never constructed snowman – across Australia visiting Big Things. In doing so the paper interrogates the architectural and social impact of the car on rural Australia and where Big Things come from.

CLARE McCRACKEN is a socially-engaged artist and academic whose practice-led research sits at the intersection of art and cultural geography. She employs innovative, performance methodologies to research how mobility systems co-produce space, place and landscape across generations in Australia.