Richard Goodwin ‘The Ulysses Suite’

In News November 10, 2016

‘Artist Richard Goodwin feasts on the carcass of James Joyce’s epic novel Ulysses.

Marcel Duchamp gave artists the “readymade”. I owe my art practice, at least in part, to this device, which enables me to radically transform the meaning of objects with little or no physical intervention. Thus something can become something else. Duchamp’s masterpiece, The Large Glass is a complex formula, filled with rich metaphors and references to his previous oeuvre, such as Nude Descending a Staircase, 1912.

It is impossible to solve this formula, but easy to fall into its challenge, which is as richly rewarding as music. It lays fertile soil for all types of speculation. Even the dust on its famously shattered surface, claimed by Duchamp’s acceptance of chance, falls under the scrutiny of Man Ray’s photography.

My work marries performance with installation, transformed objects, and 2D/3D formula drawings in constellations. I claim mathematics as Western “dreaming”, and I toy with its spatial maps.

Perhaps the ultimate formula, Ulysses, by James Joyce, interrogates Homer’s Iliad, while poking the wound riven between England and Ireland. The Ulysses Suite is what I did while reading and re-reading Ulysses and Homer. This epic journey took me into the Labyrinth, which I read as “Minimalism”, and on into a vortex, with my readymade “exoskeleton machine”’.

– Richard Goodwin, 2016

This Installation includes:

Ulysses Suite: two drawing/painting/mixed media images, each in 5 panels measuring 2 x 2 m, Dedalus’s Prosthesis for a Minotaur: The independent exoskeleton and Ulysses Suite – Performances.

The Artist will be giving a talk about this body of work on

Saturday 12 November 2016 at 2pm

35 Derby Street Collingwood, VIC

All welcome

The Ulysses Suite is open 7 days from 10am to 6pm and is current until 20 November 2016 

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