Lucas Ihlein

Born 1975, Sydney
Bachelor of Arts, Visual Arts (Hons)
Graduation show: 1996
Graduation ceremony: 1997


Artwork in Space YZ

Saw Your Double Bed in Two, 1998/2021
Mattress, wood, doona, pillows, hand-made macramé hangers, projector, VHS player, single channel video
Dimensions variable

Full title of the work:

Saw your double bed in two,
lengthwise.
Fix it to the wall,
high up, end to end.
Sleep with your lover,
toes touching in the night.

The video in this installation from 1998 is a silent, looped VHS transfer of a Super 8 film shot from my backyard in St John Street, Newtown where I was living in 1997. The planes were deafening - my housemates and I would have to pause our conversation whenever one passed over. So shooting them on silent Super 8 film was an attempt to domesticate these steel beasts, to turn them to another use. The constant repetition of planes silently landing, entangling with socks on the washing line was, I hoped, comforting and soporific, like counting sheep. 

The video technology (projector and VHS player) were incorporated into the installation with handmade macramé rope hangers. My mum sent me a pattern for pot hangers she’d saved since the macramé craze of the 1970s, and talked me through how to do the knotting on the phone from Perth. 

The bed was my own. I was prompted to split it in two following the exhibition Pillow Talk (1997) at South Gallery, curated by Chris Fortescue and Simon Barney.

For Pillow Talk, artists had to submit their bed “as is” to the gallery for two weeks, and so for that period I camped in the corner of my bedroom. When my double mattress came home again after the exhibition, suddenly my space seemed very cramped. I solved this spatial problem by splitting the mattress and turning the bed into a long shelf, up off the floor.

Saw Your Double Bed in Two was first exhibited at 151 Regent St Gallery, Sydney, in a show presented in collaboration with fellow UWS alumnus Paul Gifford, called Absenteeism: Bath Tub Ring. 151 Regent St Gallery was run by UWS alumni Rohan Stanley and Rebecca Neill. It was a formative space for me as an artist in my early twenties - many important friendships were made. It was like a clubhouse for UWS artists and others in the artist-run scene in Sydney. 

After 151 Regent St, the installation was shown as part of Technics, curated by Estelle Barrett, featuring Barb Bolt, Helen Britton and me, at Craftwest Gallery, Perth Festival, 1998.

Re-creating this installation 23 years later has been a joy and a challenge. The video component of the work was originally made on Super 8 and VHS, which were the best technologies available to me at the time. Should I transfer it to high definition digital files? The trouble is, the spatial balance of the installation was created by the physicality of the VHS player and video projector, objects with tangible weight and volume hanging like testicles under the bed-shelf. To retain this material element, I decided to take the rather impractical route of re-presenting the work with its original media formats. This meant finding second hand video recorders on eBay, re-transferring the original Super 8 film, dubbing multiple VHS tapes (which will degrade over the course of the Space YZ exhibition), and wrangling aspect ratios so that the whole thing plays nicely in 2021. 

The original cut-in-half mattress is long gone (it spent some time in Mum’s garage before eventually being sent to the tip). I considered trying to find a secondhand mattress to use in the new version, but it didn’t seem right. It had to be my mattress. With some trepidation my partner Lizzie agreed to let me cut our mattress in two. For several days, as I worked with Lizzie’s mum Sue, stitching the mattress back together again so it would fit the long shelf in the gallery, our household experienced something akin to the chaotic disruption of my life at that time. 

For more information about this artwork, click here.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Daniel Mudie Cunningham, Raquel Ormella, Paul Gifford, Tim Hilton, Michelle Seamons, Erna Lilje, Suzann Victor, Susie Lingham, Isabella Reich, Claire Armstrong, Anne Graham, Jennifer Barrett, Susan Best, Jill Beaulieu, George Alexander, Michelle Purcell, Tim Bruniges, Mick Hender, Andrew Gaynor, Josie Brooke, Chris Fortescue, Joan Grounds, Dennis Del Favero, Rohan Stanley, Bec Neill, Daniel Ormella and Jo Boag. For the 2021 re-creation, special thanks to Sue Muller for textiles work; David Langosch, Phu Nguyen, Emily Rolfe, and Jenny Tubby at Campbelltown Arts Centre; to builder Andrew Dening for the supply of the oregon timber; and to Lizzie and Albie Muller for tolerating the household disruption.

My time at UWS

I only spent one year at UWS Nepean - 1996. I had finished a Bachelor of Fine Arts at UWA in Perth, and I was looking to make a move. I needed to expand my group of collaborators and mentors. I first heard of UWS because some students from Nepean were featured in the Hatched National Graduate Show at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts. I remember an unwieldy audio installation with magnetic tape from cassettes looped around an entire room - an impressively impractical endeavour.

Anne Graham, a key artist and academic at UWS, was invited to Perth at the end of 1995 to give a lecture. She told us about the art school at Nepean and showed us some of her projects, including Sweat (1994) which used a sewing machine on the streets of New York; and others where she showed films and served soup in public parks. These pieces made a strong impression on me. I guess in retrospect Anne was making what became known as ‘relational art’ - fostering social interactions through her work. If this was what UWS was about, I was fully into it. In 1996, I transferred over to do my Honours year. 

While studying at the Nepean campus, I lived in Ashfield with my Nana Joyce and Aunty Gabe, and took the train out to Kingswood five days a week. I had a lot of time for thinking and self-reflection (three hours a day!) - perhaps too much. There was a park between the train station and the uni that you had to trudge through, with constantly swooping magpies - Raquel Ormella introduced me to what it was called by students commuting to UWS: “Bastard Park”. I got a job re-shelving books at Werrington campus library, and spent long hours in the edit suite making endless self-reflective works on VHS tapes.

For some reason art schools like to divide themselves up into boxes - painting, sculpture, photography, etc. At UWS, we had some novel names for those boxes - 2D (encompassing painting and drawing etc), 3D (sculpture and installation), 4D (time-based art like video and photography). Terry Hayes describes these “studdies” in his piece on the history of the UWS art school, here. But there was also a category called ‘ID’, which perhaps stood for ‘inter-disciplinary’? I always thought of ID as “Other, Please Specify”. This seemed right for me. The group of artists that I connected with at Nepean seemed more interested in experimental processes than specific media formats. Significant peers for me included Paul Gifford, Tim Hilton, Raquel Ormella, Michelle Seamons, Rohan Lee, Erna Lilje, Nathan Waters, and Suzann Victor. I also connected with some music students like Kirsten Bradley and Tim Bruniges, and creative writers like Susie Lingham and Fiona Winning - UWS had brilliant experimental programs in all these areas, not just the visual arts.  

Many of us were taught by Joan Grounds and Chris Fortescue. Chris was my Honours supervisor, and one of the most important mentors I’ve ever had. We would have weekly cups of coffee. His supervision style was perverse. If I said “A”, he would say “B”. The following week, if I came around to “B”, he would switch to “A”. He had a detached and ironic manner. Some might find his method maddening, but it was exactly what I needed at the time. I’m sure Chris found my intense introspection and self-questioning amusing. I was a Very Serious Student. As he wrote in his supervisor’s report at the end of 1996, “Lucas arrived from the west with a set of presumptions and proceeded to unpack them”. 

Actually, unpacking my own presumptions was pretty much all I did, 24/7. A few bits of this unpacking process ended up looking like Art, but mostly it manifested as reams of diary entries, self-questionnaires, and solipsistic video interviews that nobody, not even me, would ever rewind and watch back. I produced a lot of this indigestible material and very little Art. My deliberate method of refusing to commit to a known outcome in advance of any public presentation of my work was maddening to some, and created anxiety in others who thought I was doomed to fail my Honours. Chris’ report is worth reading in full - it gives you an idea of how strongly he was advocating for me, in the face of this institutional anxiety:

Re-reading Chris’ report is also useful to me now, because it contains the germ of what I’ve gone on to do ever since. The uncontrollable, unruly process of ‘working with people’ which I can’t seem to get away from these days, was first sprouted that year at UWS.

I’ve always been a ‘situation-specific’ artist - making work about the circumstances in which I find myself. The trouble was, by the end of 1996, I’d been in formal institutional education continuously since kindergarten and I had begun (predictably!) to make work about the social relations within formal educational institutions. This was fine I suppose, for what it was, but when I finished honours at UWS I knew I needed to experience some other things in life. I got a job at a bookstore, lived in Newtown in a scabby share-house called ‘Trumpet Week’, went to parties, and tried my best not to be too rigorously self-examining all the time. 

Shortly after leaving university, my classmate Tim Hilton and I began exchanging ‘poem-thingies’ (we were too shy to call them actual poems), and making zines together with small observations from everyday life. My work in these years looks very different from what I did at UWS. More whimsical, less ‘post-conceptual’. More soft-headed. Tim and I regularly exchanged transcripts of our dreams, enjoyed playful language and ambiguity. I was also exchanging dreamy faxes and postcards regularly with Raquel Ormella (who was living in Vienna that year) and we were planning to move in together on her return. And so it was, within the chaotic and sometimes joyful context of post-university share-house living under the flight path, that Saw Your Double Bed in Two emerged.