He loves the process of manufacture, the place of manufactured objects in space and time, the form, utility and beauty of objects. An early 1980s student work illustrates this - a large block of wood carved to look like a partly emptied box. The resulting wood chips, adjacent in a pile, were a physical, quantifiable memory of the event. He is concerned with memory and trace.

At that time, he made hessian sacks and tubes, filled them with sand or cement and stacked them, eg in coils. The forms are suggestive, but their accidental character is to avoid inherent symbolism - they are only potentially symbolic. For Dady, the act of making is important. They were spontaneous, a record or trace of performance. Dady's works were included in the prestigious New Contemporaries show at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London in 1983, his final year at Maidstone College.

In the 1993 group show Men in Space, at the University of Adelaide Union Gallery, he showed Untitled Pissing Work, comprising a copper pipe precariously poised over a bucket that sat on a large sheet of steel, set monumentally on low bricks. The hose filled the bucket with clean blue water, but created a spray which drizzled on to the steel floor, rusting it. The parody of the Copenhagen fountain and the associations with men's urination and work objects are deliberately obvious, though later work has rarely embodied such direct symbolism.

The Hirings series comprised objects hired from commercial firms. In Hirings One to Four (1993), at the Experimental Art Foundation over four consecutive days, four sets of objects were each installed for one day. Firstly, a large marquee occupied the gallery, a room within a room. Then there was a row of large floor-standing fans. Thirdly, there was a row of baths, filled with water, an institutional towel draped over the side of each one. Finally, there was a set of walking frames, crutches and similar devices, set out on rolls of artificial lawn. All these objects' potential uses, and our relationship with them, were opened to question.

Hiring Five, at the Greenaway Gallery a week later, comprised scaffolding - straight rows of supports used to hold up a ceiling that didn't need to be held up. Hiring Six formed part of the group show Jemmy (Ebenezer Buildings, 1994) - a huge industrial fridge, in operation, like a (cold) room within a room.

The objects in Hirings One to Four were hired for a day, in Hirings Five, for a week, in Hirings Six, for a month - typical hiring periods for such objects, whose identity as possessions is thus constructed temporally, reminding us of the limitations inherent in the concept of tenure.

Hiring Seven took the form of an Artist's Page in Broadsheet (1994) depicting a "witch's hat", the ubiquitous orange road marker. In published form, this hiring's "longevity" is potentially infinite. From it he made dozens of plaster moulds, shown at the CACSA as Untitled Multiple. Each cast was very thin, progressively crumbling away during the exhibition - potentially infinite in number but finite in their existence. Each was a trace of the singular hiring, but no matter how many times a memory is recalled, it's still a memory. They crowded the CACSA driveway, suggesting, for example, the endlessly self-propagating brooms of the sorcerer's apprentice.

But Dady believes that the Hiring series wasn't uniformly successful - the fans were switched on, creating a breeze, their functioning drawing attention away from themselves. The bath towels were loaded with meaning by being institutional. Plain towels, or none, would have been better.

There is something Duchampian about such use of objects. But the point is not the recontextualisation of the object, nor the questioning of art. It is the thing itself, in that space. Duchamp would title his work, guiding interpretation. Dady prefers "Untitled". Duchamp shifts your perception. Dady captures the point of potential for a shift. Success for Dady is thus difficult - a sculpture can fail if it urges too specific an interpretation. In suggesting his approach, he quotes Umberto Eco: "... all contribute to a halo of indefiniteness and to make the text pregnant with infinite suggestive possibilities"*. The artist must develop an internal logic, and a content, for a work. The logic can itself be the content. Sculpture is a trigger.

He has attempted other kinds of forms. A series of figures of the 1980s recalled Giacometti's stretched and tortured figures, and carried much emotional and symbolic weight, but he no longer pursues such ideas. He likes obvious and banal moves, though they must be so accomplished that they are no longer banal, nor merely enigmatic. In his studio at Maylands, he made piles of his personal possessions. In neat stacks forming large cubes or tetrahedrons, or simply piled into the corner, his possessions became things in themselves. Their relationship to each other, and to the space, is that of objecthood.

One of Dady's teaching exercises involves taking his students on sculpture camps, where a weekend is spent thinking through a work towards its creation. He had been on such a camp in the North Yorkshire Moors with Anthony Gormley in 1984, making drawings out of stones from a creek bed. These drawings are still there, landmarks visible from the air. Students are given a piece of space and an object, and collide these disparate elements to explore the possibilities of material things.

His work is conceptual but is not Conceptualism. It is theoretical but does not merely illustrate theory. For him, the thinking through is crucial, though there is obviously an intuitive undercurrent.

He is interested in forms of language. Some of his work involves writing, but is about the recording of ideas, not the ideas themselves. For Propositional Work (GAG, 1999), he drew writing-like forms on thick, unframed, canvas stretchers, the drawing continuing around the sides of the stretchers to suggest infinitation. The stretchers are A4 in proportion, mimicking standard writing paper. Dady has also been involved in film, especially with filmmaker Colin Reck. One of the drawings in Untitled Notation is an abstraction of a story board.

Some time ago, he moved away from drawing as representation. Sculpture is three-dimensional, about things in space relative to one's self. 2D things don't operate in the same way. A drawing is a container of meaning within a codified system, like a page of text. Painting and drawing take their media as given, whereas sculpture can't. In the real world, there isn't just colour, there are objects which appear coloured. Sculpture accretes associations with material things. In painting, materiality can be downplayed. Deck chairs, like those in Propositional Work, can be folded into 2D or extended into 3D, sitting on the boundary between 2D and 3D forms.

He is thus interested in drawing as made object. He recently produced rectangles and discs of dense scribble in ball-point pen, so dense that the ink enlarges the paper it covers. If a blank border is retained, the sheet within buckles. One example, covering an area of about 4.5 x 1.3 m, was included in Collaborative Works (GAG, 2000), an exhibit
of work made jointly with architect Simone Vinall. The execution of that drawing consumed 450 ball point pens. These drawings are loaded with symbolic potential yet symbolise nothing - they are in a latent state, sitting at that point where an object, or text, could take on meaning, but has not.

There are drawings that look like aggregations of architectural sketches or doodlings. He does figure drawings, to gain the sense of the 'thing of it' rather than for the content. He draws from memory, as an act of searching the memory, rather than to represent directly.

He experiments. One drawing was made with a length of dowel dipped in paint. Others have done similar things, and of course this is about process. Dady's resulting image is both a record of process and a resolved abstract, a condensation of visual languages - cross-hatchings, geomet
shapes, arrows.

He set fire to a wooden chair, extinguished it, and then drew on a large sheet of paper with the charcoaled legs. The burnt chair and the paper became the work Untitled Chair Drawing (1995). The threads of drawing, of what charcoal is and what a chair is (and what it is to sit and draw/write) are woven together. The drawing is only a few lines - just enough to suggest trace and possibility.

An enduring theme is the horn. In Propositional Work, he included a drawing of a trombone, stretched straight out, occupying the wall. This work appeared quite different from the rest of that show, but many felt it to be the most successful. It was so minimal and yet captured the essence of what it is to depict the idea of a thing on paper, and to exaggerate it. The horn, and the act of rendering it, become iconic.

He has an abiding interest in architecture. His metal frame for the front of the GAG, Untitiled Notation (GAG, 1998) is a realisation of his architectural doodlings on a photo of the gallery's facade. The metalwork forms 2D lines and arrows as drawn by an architect studying the building, dissecting its design and proposing a new work. At the CACSA in February 2001 he takes this concept a step further and constructs an analogue of the CACSA building.

He has received numerous commissions, eg the northern perimeter fence at Hindmarsh Stadium (1999-2000), and the interior of a Norwood hair salon (mid-1980s). Another commission was the well-known horn-shaped objects in the University of Adelaide grounds. These grew from a previous work comprising three spindly metal wheels supporting a gramophone horn, suggesting an old person, with an ear trumpet, in a bath chair. He believes that the Adelaide University sculpture is overly na•ve.

The fence at Hindmarsh Stadium is not yet complete, and should include large, overhead arrows like those used in architectural drawings to locate things like door hinges and locks. As with Untitiled Notation, the fence refers to architectural notation, a codified language. The wooden battens in Collaborative Works formed a plane or a grid, set at an angle to the wall, the architectural cross-hatching opening that space for speculation. Such work dislocates your relationship with the space you're in.

He constructs endlessly and so carefully, the finish being fundamental. The pods in Collaborative Works were painstakingly rendered - five wooden containers, each over a metre long, suspended by belts of black material from the gallery ceiling. Each comprises two layers of timber, though the inside layer is invisible. They are about carpentry, engineering.

Collaborative Works was a project realised jointly by Dady and architect Simone Vinall. It suggested a moment where art, architecture, engineering and crafting merge. The forms - the pods, the drawing, the battens - become a meta-language, written onto the space they occupy, having the character of everyday things but with no apparent purpose. Lacking overt symbolism, they have an innocent beauty. The effort that went into their making epitomises the universal processes of designing and manufacturing. His next project is again with Simone Vinall, in her field of architecture. There is a clear artistic empathy between them.

Chair & Table (1999) succinctly articulates Dady's ideas. Here a chair and a table "intersect", defeating the function of both and thus creating a new thing in the world, but one whose propensities are not delineated. Chair & Table, however, is not a defeat object, it's a shift in the relationship between two everyday objects. The work could have been about being kept in after school, or the loneliness of the desk. But Dady wanted to avoid provoking fixed interpretations, so he turned the chair at a slight angle to the table to suggest that it had just been casually pushed in. Such apparently insignificant moves can be crucial.

Instead of representing a drama, to which we can all relate and which predisposes closure, Dady portrays a moment of relationship between things, a moment of potential, leaving issues open. At the point where ideas germinate, there is scope for interest.

Johnnie Dady completed a BA (Hons) in sculpture at Maidstone College of Art in 1983 and an Master of Visual Arts at the University of SA in 1996. He moved to Australia in 1987 and has taught sculpture and drawing at Adelaide Central School of Art since 1992.

* Umberto Eco, The Open Work, Harvard, 1989





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