A folly

A Folly She chose to make a path of gold And thought that in order to achieve her path of gold She must use her most beautiful dress of gold So in a lonely place of gold She cut into her dress of gold While all her thoughts were of gold Finally, she stood and quivered before the gold As she began to see her unreasonable predicament with gold For now, she felt cold in her delicate cage of gold And reasoned that each of her footsteps would destroy The Path of Gold ************************************************************************************ A Folly is part of a body of work created while a Visual Arts Fellow at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. Knowing little about Australia in general, and Western Australia in particular I started in the library where I quickly learned of the title 'The Cinderella State'. Soon I was journeying, like an early settler, eats and north-eats, beyond Kalgoorlie to Kanowna and up to Day Dawn and Cue. I personally recreated the colonising move inland. To Epitomise the sense of Cinderella in this strange land of promise and melancholy I made exquisite dresses, pierced and cut so that fragments fall onto the desert soil. A golden dress was made, and worn, in the goldfields, the fragments laid like a princess's bridal train across the foreign soil. In old Kalgoorlie, nothing could be more valuable and yet more useless than a fine bridal gown. Photographing myself in these garments, I provided a summary in an artist's book and displayed the finely made originals in the appropriately heritage building of the Arts Centre Fremantle. In a review by Robert Cook, he states: 'The visitors' book indicated that there had been many gallerygoers who had connected immediately with the show's gentle creation of a language appropriate to the ideas.' The Western Australian Today, Wed 12 May 1999.