Design and Art Australia Online

Sydney based artist, Allan Giddy was born in 1960 in Morrinsville, New Zealand. He describes his practice as 'active public art’. He has photographic work in New Zealand’s national collection, but is better known for his sculpture, installation, video and digital media works.

On leaving school Giddy completed an electrical trade apprenticeship, working in hospitals and heavy industry. Although he soon changed direction, this early trajectory later facilitated his use of light and energy technologies in his art, and seeded a lasting fascination with decaying industrial sites in need of reinvigoration.

Giddy moved to Sydney, Australia, in 1989, and completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Sculpture) at the College of Fine Arts (COFA), University of New South Wales (UNSW) in 1992. He was joint winner of the Sherman Gallery Sculptural Prize in 1992 and won the Helen Lemprière Travelling Art Scholarship in 1993. As a result, Giddy enrolled as a guest student at HBK Art Academy in Saarbrücken, Germany, where he researched the use of sensing systems in media art. He was then invited to become a guest fellow at the Centre for Advanced Investigation in the Interactive Arts (CAIIA) at the University of Wales in the United Kindom, where he studied interactivity and the (then fledgling) internet in art making from 1994 to 1995. During this time he attended the 1994 Symposium for Interactive Marketing Communication in Heidelberg, Germany, and exhibited his first solar powered work, Hours Remaining in the Life of Allan Giddy, in the associated Wandlung exhibition. This work is a solar powered digital backwards-counting 'clock’ that counts down how many hours Giddy has left to live, based on statistical predictions for the average New Zealand male born in the 1960s.

Returning to Australia in 1996, Giddy exhibited frequently both in Sydney and overseas, including in the Netherlands, Germany and Finland. In 1999 he also conceived and co-curated his first exhibition, “Lumen”, at UNSW’s Solarch Solar Research Centre. Featuring works by COFA staff and students, “Lumen” examined renewable energy and light from multiple perspectives.

At this time Giddy was studying for his Master of Fine Art (Sculpture) at COFA. In his investigations into light and time, culminating in 2001 with a solo exhibition, “Intersection” (Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney), audience participation often played a key role. A prominent work to emerge from this period was Pissoir, an 'interactive urinal’ that facilitated on-screen drawing through urination.

During 2002 Giddy co-curated his second exhibition at Solarch, “Appliance”, featuring technology-inspired installations and artworks using renewable energy. He was subsequently awarded the Ecological Prize at Sculpture by the Sea, Sydney, for his work Minor Attractor. This work collects solar energy daily, using it at night to attract insects, which then become part of an artificial ecosystem lit by the same UV light that attracts them.

In 2006 Giddy’s Weather Cranes, a permanent public installation at The Armory, Sydney Olympic Park, reinvigorated a pair of heritage-listed cranes by rendering them humidity and temperature sensitive. Each crane holds a string of weather-responsive, coloured indicator lights that register climatic conditions.

In many of his digital media works Giddy generates music from visual footage, creating his own conversion formulas to transpose colour, movement or other factors into sound. In both 2005 and 2008 he was a finalist in the Blake Prize and his 2008 work Stations of the Cross was amongst works selected to tour interstate (2008-09).

In 2008 he was also selected for inclusion in “Figuring Landscapes”. This collection of moving image works, curated by Catherine Elwes, featured United Kingdom and Australia based artists who addressed issues of representation, nation and identity through landscape. The exhibition toured the United Kingdom, including the Tate Modern in London, before ending at Brisbane’s Queensland Gallery of Modern Art and Dell Gallery.

In Sonic Wells (2008) Giddy’s pioneering use of technology in public art combined with his interest in reinvigorating post-industrial areas. This international installation, developed for the Cork Harbour Project (2008), linked Sydney’s Irish diaspora with its origins. In this work he built two 'wells’, one outside the Mercantile Hotel in Sydney and the other on Casement Square, Cobh, County Cork, Ireland. Each well collected ambient sounds that, transmitted live via the internet, were emitted from its 'sister’ well. People gathered around one well listened to live audio as it was incident at the other, and vice versa; it seemed that Giddy had created a virtual hole through the earth connecting these two harbour sites.

In 2008, as Founding Director of the Environmental Research Initiative for Art (ERIA), Giddy was working on developing a research centre to trial the use of sustainable energy systems in art. ERIA’s goal is to develop and explore the use of sustainable technology both in the fabrication of public artworks (in a solar/wind powered workshop) and in powering the works themselves once installed. The intent being for the energy systems developed to be trialed for other purposes, including remote fieldwork, exhibitions and screenings.

At the time of writing Giddy was engaged in a major public project, Earth v Sky, centred on two iconic Moreton Bay fig trees in Bicentennial Park, Glebe (on Sydney Harbour’s foreshore). He was designing a colour-sensitive lighting control system to illuminate the trees’ canopies in an inversion of the colours of the evening sky, responding in real time to the changing colours of the twilight, with the work to be powered by a silent wind turbine.

Writers:

De Lorenzo, Dr Catherine Note:
Champion, Scott Note:

Date written:

2011

Last updated:

2011

Status:

peer-reviewed