The durational performance ‘Uprooted’ re-encounters my memory of being uprooted from Mount Gambier and moved to Adelaide as a child.
The performance action is:
Plant seven roses and tend them for seven months
At the end of this period, Carefully wrap the rose heads.
Rip the rose bushes from their beds.
Walk them to their new home, five hours away.
Re-plant each one.
Tend to them for the rest of your life.
Uprooted, 2022
The roses were planted at Adelaide Central School of Art, where they were tended to for seven months. I watered, fed and visited them. Cut off the old leaves and praised the blooms.
After seven months, I took them, as I was taken to Aldgate, the suburb we moved to. I walked for 5 hours, carrying the rose bushes, as agencyless as I was and with the courage, determination and pain my mother had. I walked this long to echo the similar time it takes to drive from Mount Gambier to Aldgate. I sought to encounter every difficult moment and process it along the way.
A main theorist from this body of work, Amelia Jones, argues for "new models of analysis … that allow for a focus on how action intersects with materials to produce new spaces of meaning” (Jones, 2015). By revisiting this memory and joining it with symbolic materials, gestures and time, I re-establish what it means to me. Resulting in, as Jones writes, a new space of meaning for it to now reside.
The resulting public artwork of 7 roses can be located on the Aldgate main street.
Photographed by Joseph James Francis
