The backyard is where cricket begins. On summer days, siblings all over Australia battle it out for long hours. Despite the very real chance of a ball hurtling through windows or onto the roof, this period of trial and error is a critical time for any budding cricketer – as Adelaide-based artists Trent Parke and Narelle Autio are well aware.
“Most of it you’ll learn in the formative years of your life in your backyard,” Parke says of the sport. “By the time you start playing cricket at a club you’ve already done six, seven, however many thousands of hours against your brother. That point is when you learn the most about the game.”
Parke and Autio may well have logged a similar number of hours recently, albeit behind the camera. Their new collaboration, multi-channel video installation The Summation of Force, is a filmic love song to cricket, shot largely in their own backyard. Through the game-play of the artists’ two young sons, it traverses a dreamy suburban narrative about passion, skill and corporate cricket: Parke describes the work as “charting the course from the innocence of the backyard to the professional athlete”.
In The Summation of Force, the path to excellence and televisual spectacle – a wrestle of talent, training and science – plays out across three acts. The boys are seen moving through backyard games, a team selection process, and rigorous routines complete with biometric equipment. Slow-motion shots draw out the physical elements contributing to ‘force.’
“We’re interested in the biomechanics of it, how the body moves,” says Parke. “You watch the [professional] bowlers – they’re amazing, almost like dancers.”
Awash with symbolism, The Summation of Force meditates upon an industry defined by nostalgia, rigid competition, and the science of motion.
The Summation of Force
Trent Parke and Narelle Autio
SAMSTAG
30 June – 1 September
Developed in 2022 by Artback NT as part of Apmere Mparntwe—the Australian Ceramics Triennale— touring exhibition Clay on Country, showing now at New England Regional Art Museum, showcases the diversity of ceramics in the Central Desert.
About Face is a smart piece of marketing. The new book on portrait painting from Australia and New Zealand has a mission to change buyers’ minds about the field. But as Jane O’Sullivan discovers, any sales pitch wears thin if it’s repeated often enough, and the close attention to how portrait painting is received by the market means that other important conversations fade to the background.
In Anmatyerr artist Elizabeth Mbitjana Pitijana’s first solo exhibition in Melbourne—which focuses on the Central Desert food source Arnwekety (bush plum)—the influence and love of her Country and culture is palpable. Elizabeth Mbitjana Pitijana is now showing at Niagara Galleries.
Two exhibitions in Sydney are showcasing interdisciplinary research on climate change communicated in artistic ways.
Helen Mueller has been printmaking for 25 years, but moving to Hobart four years ago shifted her focus to the local natural environment. Now her delicate prints, made with materials foraged from the forest floor, are showing at Handmark Gallery.
The National Gallery of Victoria has announced the next instalment of the Winter Masterpieces series, coming in June 2025, will be a return to French Impressionism—an exhibition from 2021 that closed as soon as it opened due to the global pandemic.
