Constance ARI

The Collector is an examination of fetish, perversion, isolation and madness through the eyes of Henry Papin ; a fictional character created by artists Tricky Walsh and Mish Meijers.

The character of Henry is an alienated and desolate one. He introduces the audience to his hallucinatory world through a collection of secondary characters: The confectioner, The man at the bathhouse, The smoking woman, The psychiatrist, The priest and The engraver - they are embodied within a collection of telling objects. Catalogued and housed inside custom made cabinets, he has documented, and reconstructed their lives according to his own suppositions.

The cabinets occupy the centre of the gallery in a reconstruction of Henry's private museum. On one wall, an engraved plaque accompanies a sound piece. On the remaining walls, small samples of hair, sticky taped and chronologically dated form a precise eye-level line around the space. They wait in the dark to be incidentally noticed. They are Henry's calendar - a physical, visual evolution of time.

The Audience enters the darkened room and experiences it by torchlight, as if an intruder in a house or a stage where the actors have vacated the theatre; they are free to roam about amongst the props and sets, to become part of the overall image of the work, and fill the role of the absent Henry.

Tricky Walsh and Mish Meijers are both Hobart-based artists with multi-disciplinary practices that span the visual arts, theatre and film. This is their first collaboration, a project that endeavours to combine those media into one cohesive visual experience.