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                    Rose Hawker

                    Test Sites Online: Round 1

                    A cement plaque inscribed with the words 'State Electricity Commission of Victoria, City Section 7c
                    Rose Hawker works predominantly with sculptural work  centred on monumentality and memorialism.

                    ​Rose moved to Melbourne from the UK in 2014 to complete a Masters in Public Art at RMIT. Since then she has worked predominantly with sculpture, in particular bronze. Her work is centred on monumentality and memorialism, with a focus on ways of making the private public through small interventions of personal narratives in public spaces. Materials and processes are an integral part of her work, as is the use of scale. 

                    She has worked for Australian sculptor Ewen Coates at his studio foundry for 4 years and she won the Hidden sculpture award at Rookwood cemetery in Sydney in 2018.

                    NOT FAIR, NOT WEAK

                    My original intention was to build a small collection of miniature monuments to the city, the people in it and how the public space was used. Obviously this would not have been possible as currently there are no people inhabiting public spaces and the city is shrouded with an eerie emptiness.

                    Instead I decided to try and uncover some of Melbourne's lesser known past. I reached out to the Victorian branch of the PHA (Professional Historians Association) and it soon became clear that stories about women should be my focus. Melbourne's monumental landscape, like much of the world, is predominantly male so it made sense that the lesser known histories I was researching were largely about women.

                    From the stories I started to form ideas around how I could represent them in the form of a tiny monument. I knew I wanted to use bronze, and maybe stone, to give them the look of traditional monuments, at least in materials. 

                    It is important that women are recognised and represented equally in this city. Although these tiny works do not compare to the giant traditional monuments to men we see in the city, they can act as a starting point, a way to start a conversation around women’s Melbourne, the current inequality in representation, and how to gain some balance.

                    The title, NOT FAIR, NOT WEAK comes from the two very outdated ideas that women are the fairer sex and the weaker sex. Although these archaic descriptors are not often used so explicitly anymore, they are still very much felt by all female identifying people. The word fair in the title references not only its use as a way to describe women, but also the imbalance of recognition/representation.


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