LUKE PARKER
Sampler, 2000–2001 

Exhibited: Elastic contemporary art projects, Sydney, 2000; 1st Floor artists’ and writers’ space, Melbourne, 2001 

Stephen Zagala, catalogue text, 1st Floor artists’ and writers’ space, Melbourne, 2001 

‘Time after time’ 



I'm sitting in a tram, facing the back of the carriage as it rattles its way up Swanston Street. A group of teenagers suddenly slide into view from my peripheral vision and then slowly disappear into the distance as the tram continues along the tracks. When the tram draws to a stop, the playful gaggle of teenagers gradually catch up. Growing larger and louder, they capture the attention of my fellow travellers. Together, we watch their antics; the pushing and shoving, the posing and sauntering. And then, the doors of the tram close, sealing off the sounds of the street as we jolt forward again. We withdraw from the teenagers and allow ourselves to be distracted by other things. 

This process repeats itself several times. Sometimes the teenagers move ahead of the tram and then rush back through my field of vision. At other times they linger at a tantalising distance without getting any nearer. They continually threaten to disappear, closing in on themselves to become a mute speck in the mottled background of the metropolis. And, throughout all this, my consciousness is caught up in a rhythmic coalescence with the other tram travellers, who come and go as the tram shuffles up the street. 

Similar movements weave their way through Luke Parker's stitched drawings. These works are constructed on readymade sheets of paper: a letter from the tax department, pages from Felix Gonzales-Torres' paper stacks, a calendar from an art institution. For a range of subtle reasons, Luke holds these things close, pinning them to the wall, letting them occupy his life, allowing them to evoke memories and gather new associations. He uses the found stationery to harness movements and then stitches his own rhythms into the mix. 

Luke often sews another found image into the working surface, binding associations together to thicken intuitions and give them a different sense of consistency. A spiral from one of Duchamp's Rotoreliefs is stitched into the poetic gold rings of a Gonzales-Torres' Untitled (Double Portrait), mixing the ambient refrains of these two art works together in a way which puts a new spin on both. The image from a Joy Division album reverberates with a certain melancholy across the patterned backing of bureaucratic correspondence, and then returns in another work, rippling out through the sublime ambience of the open sea. 

Sometimes Luke uses stitching to highlight things that are already on the paper, explicitly grafting his own interests into the surface. On a page from Gonzales-Torres' Untitled (Death by Gun) paper stack, which reproduces the names, ages and faces of 464 people killed by bullet wounds in the United States during a one-week period, Luke stitches around all the people who are his age and the ages of the two friends who brought him this page from New York. Luke's own birthday happens to fall within this week, so the deaths from that particular day are also highlighted. 

This is a rhythmic operation of drawing things apart and together, but there is never any drawing to a close in Luke's line-work. These loops of thread hold together fragile habitats that are in a process of continually coming about.