Messing about in boats and Padme at MacQuarie University 2010.
Padme is a solar powered digital audio floating sculpture that is activated by wave motion and by water birds nudging the antennae-like motion sensing ‘whiskers’ that radiate from the work.
Padme (Nelumbo nucifera), the sacred lotus, is an aquatic plant that plays a central role in Indian religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.
Views of the Padme Installation
The lotus is an ancient polyvalent symbol in the Asia society. Hindus revere it with the gods Vishnu, Brahma, and the goddesses Lakshmi, Sarasvati and Kubera. Often used as an example of divine beauty and purity, Vishnu is often described as the ‘Lotus-Eyed One’. The lotus, springs from the navel of Vishnu whilst he is in Yoga Nidra. The lotus blooms uncovering the creator god Brahma in padmasana.
Its unfolding petals suggest the expansion of the soul. The growth of its pure beauty from the mud of its origin holds a benign spiritual promise. Particularly Brahma and Lakshmi, the divinities of potency and wealth, have the lotus symbol associated with them.
Zhou Dunyi: “I love the lotus because while growing from mud, it is unstained.”
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A phenomenon by definition is inextricably linked to the possession of a sensory body. Naturally it is our habitual (and inevitable) use of the body’s perceptual horizons as indexical mechanisms which have created topologies of embodied and disembodied events or thresholds of the tangible and the intangible. As any foray, beyond a world bounded by Newtonian physics will demonstrate, our perceptually framed understanding of spatial and temporal reality fails to recognise objects and events which refuse to conform to the scale and velocity of the Procrastes bed which the frame of our body has become…....
Nigel Helyer 1992, An Unrequited Space, in Working in Public.