Len Lye, Snowbirds (8)

Len Lye, Snowbirds (8)

Dane Mitchell’s Len Lye, Tombstone (6) belongs to a series of works commissioned for the exhibition Old Genes: Artists reading Len Lye. Curator Tyler Cann invited five contemporary artists to look anew at the interweaving of sound, vision and the verbal Lye’s work, and consider the artist’s legacy.

Mitchell’s work, encasements of Len Lye’s poems, respond to Lye’s own use of language. Mitchell worked with a glassblower to read aloud several of Len Lye’s poems into molten glass. The knowledge that the poems are swirling around inside these fragile, frozen speech bubbles seems to charge them from within. Mitchell makes an elegant feat of translating what is temporal and fleeting into something static, sculptural, and yet with absence at its core. Mitchell describes other works in this vein as ‘talismans’, suggesting something that holds an unseen dimension—a container and something formed by what it contains—that is not just a representation of the thing it signifies. Lye’s poems are dematerialised, taken out of written language and rendered invisible and mute. Transformed into an airy vapor, they become spirits whispering just beneath our audible threshold.

— Excerpt, Tyler Cann, Old Genes: Artists reading Len Lye, 2012. Adapted for Collection Online, 2023.