Rosie Miller is an artist who lives and works in Cairns, Queensland. Blurring the boundaries between individual studio practice and community participation, Rosie’s practice includes numerous experimental installation workshops with children.
About
Rosie Miller facilitates workshops with children who play with materials in the space, often constructing environments that ensnare their own bodies. Typically, she may set up certain conditions by erecting a structure or armature out of cardboard or lines of plastic or paper tape. She provides kilometres of materials in the form of rolls of this tape, paper or streamers. The children stretch, drop or throw them in the space. Over time, what started as a light structural outline in three dimensions condenses to function as a drawing in space and then fills more solidly so that it develops further mass and volume and becomes architectural. The artist only nominates a few parameters for the work. It is the children who collaborate with her in its making and they do so in the most dynamic way possible, with whole-body gestures in a kind of ‘action sculpture’. But through a type of entropy, the more they move and the more active they become in the making of the art, the more their bodies eventually become framed and sealed within the space–to the point of entrapment and immobilisation. Sometimes, the material Miller uses (called ‘safety’ or ‘barrier’ tape) even names and amplifies these ideas of protection, containment and limits.
Christine Toussainte Morrow
Curator
Top Image
Paper Town time-based installation for Tinkering Tank (made in conjunction with participating children at Tanks Arts Centre during the 2018 Cairns Children’s Festival), 2018
Time-lapse digital animation on flat screen, 4 min 18 sec • dimensions variable
Photograph by Lily Castleman • Image courtesy of the artist