Ashley's Heart
Wu Daxin
吴达新
Production date
2011
Object Detail
Media
copper tubes, refrigeration compressor
Measurements
250 x 150 x 120 cm
Notes
For the ‘Year of Australian Culture in China’ in 2010, three Australian artists (Benjamin Armstrong, Sam Leach and Tony Lloyd) and three Chinese artists (Cang Xin, Shi Jinsong and Wu Daxin) were funded by the Australia Council to make an arduous journey together. They first travelled for three weeks from Arnhem Land down through the Kimberley, visiting remote communities, encountering sacred sites and meeting Aboriginal elders. The next phase of the journey was a three-week road trip from Lanzhou to Lhasa, in Tibet. The final stage was an intensive one-month Beijing studio residency, where the artists set about producing work for an exhibition inspired by their experiences on the road.
Although it might be said that Wu Daxin’s previous works in the medium of ice were, in a sense, meditations upon mortality, the gruelling journey made by the six artists and their companions produced a more literal experience of the knife’s edge between life and death: the near-fatal illness suffered by his friend, the Australian art writer Ashley Crawford, in Tibet. Somewhere higher than 4000-metres above sea-level, Crawford collapsed with a combination of altitude sickness and an infection complicated by diabetes. He spent four days in intensive care in a Hong Kong hospital, where Wu saw him, attached to tubes, ventilators and other life-saving machines: he said, ‘The only thing that showed he was alive was the fact that his heart was pumping.’ At that point, Wu decided to make a work to record this shared experience.
Ashley’s Heart (2011) is a large sculpture made of suspended copper tubes. Evoking the bare branches of a winter tree, in the form of a roughly heart-shaped open basket of metal blood vessels, and powered by a refrigeration compressor, the tubes are filled with gas that circulates and is gradually frozen over the course of each day: humidity from the surrounding air forms a sheath of white ice on the metal. Water drips from the ‘branches’ into a clear Perspex base, and the work transforms itself anew each day. Spare and minimalist, yet richly imbued with metaphor, Ashley’s Heart speaks of the possibility of loss, yet also of renewal.
Although it might be said that Wu Daxin’s previous works in the medium of ice were, in a sense, meditations upon mortality, the gruelling journey made by the six artists and their companions produced a more literal experience of the knife’s edge between life and death: the near-fatal illness suffered by his friend, the Australian art writer Ashley Crawford, in Tibet. Somewhere higher than 4000-metres above sea-level, Crawford collapsed with a combination of altitude sickness and an infection complicated by diabetes. He spent four days in intensive care in a Hong Kong hospital, where Wu saw him, attached to tubes, ventilators and other life-saving machines: he said, ‘The only thing that showed he was alive was the fact that his heart was pumping.’ At that point, Wu decided to make a work to record this shared experience.
Ashley’s Heart (2011) is a large sculpture made of suspended copper tubes. Evoking the bare branches of a winter tree, in the form of a roughly heart-shaped open basket of metal blood vessels, and powered by a refrigeration compressor, the tubes are filled with gas that circulates and is gradually frozen over the course of each day: humidity from the surrounding air forms a sheath of white ice on the metal. Water drips from the ‘branches’ into a clear Perspex base, and the work transforms itself anew each day. Spare and minimalist, yet richly imbued with metaphor, Ashley’s Heart speaks of the possibility of loss, yet also of renewal.
Accession number
2011.106