Crown
Installation
Maker & role
Alison Clouston (b.1957), Artist
Production date
1999-2000
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Object detail
Title
Magical Golland
Production place
Collection
Measurements
0 - Whole, H: 21 x Diam: 19cm (H: 210 x Diam: 190mm)
Credit line
Commission, 1999
Corporate Collection, Museums of History New South Wales
Corporate Collection, Museums of History New South Wales
Caption
Magical Golland, by Alison Clouston, 1999-2000
Description
In 2000 the Historic Houses Trust of NSW (now, MHNSW) commissioned sculptor Alison Clouston to develop an exhibition inspired by the imaginary land of Golland. Eight-year-old Kathleen Buchanan Rouse (1878–1932) wrote her stories of Golland in the 1890s while living on her great-grandfather’s estate at Rouse Hill. Clouston wrote:
‘Although third generation Australian, Kathleen envisaged her Golland as an English place, peopled by kings, lords and duchesses. As hot, hum-scented winds crazed the painted shutters at Rouse Hill House, Kathleen withdrew to the interior realms of the house and her imagination. In the shadowy rooms of Rouse Hill House, distinctions between the inanimate and the alive become vague. Nature, the Animal, was all around her. Trophy heads loomed from the hallways. Furniture herded into rooms on feet scarcely evolved from hooves or paws, their muscles of horsehair stuffed and buttoned. Horns sprouted from the blades of knives, women preened themselves with the plumage of birds and the furs of foxes.’
Clouston drew upon the real and imagined realm of Kathleen to develop the exhibition Magical Golland. She interwove the natural world of the Australian landscape with objects from Kathleen's domestic life to create a place where newly sculpted pieces seemed to animate the inanimate objects from days past. Clouston wrote of the Golland project:
‘As a sculptor I am engaged in a sort of conjury but one that purposefully reveals its artifice. Here I am stitching quills from a plastic comb into the fur of an antique stole, transforming it into an echidna skin. Here I am faking taxidermy.’
‘Although third generation Australian, Kathleen envisaged her Golland as an English place, peopled by kings, lords and duchesses. As hot, hum-scented winds crazed the painted shutters at Rouse Hill House, Kathleen withdrew to the interior realms of the house and her imagination. In the shadowy rooms of Rouse Hill House, distinctions between the inanimate and the alive become vague. Nature, the Animal, was all around her. Trophy heads loomed from the hallways. Furniture herded into rooms on feet scarcely evolved from hooves or paws, their muscles of horsehair stuffed and buttoned. Horns sprouted from the blades of knives, women preened themselves with the plumage of birds and the furs of foxes.’
Clouston drew upon the real and imagined realm of Kathleen to develop the exhibition Magical Golland. She interwove the natural world of the Australian landscape with objects from Kathleen's domestic life to create a place where newly sculpted pieces seemed to animate the inanimate objects from days past. Clouston wrote of the Golland project:
‘As a sculptor I am engaged in a sort of conjury but one that purposefully reveals its artifice. Here I am stitching quills from a plastic comb into the fur of an antique stole, transforming it into an echidna skin. Here I am faking taxidermy.’
Accession number
HHT2001/9-6
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