Competing to be the World’s Greatest Grandmother/ An Installation by Luke Foster and with help installing and documenting Yanick Soyez
“Find happiness in making others happy.”
Mary MacKillop

I love this quote by Mary MacKillop Australia’s saint and I hope to make people happy with attempts at humour in my art.
This exhibition is a mixed media installation involving the mix up of different mediums.
There are two big AO photos from beach shoots and text about Trade Making Peace and the second with the text with the title of the show: Competing to be the World’s Greatest Grandmother.

There are three sculptures one a re-imagining of the sculpture I made in the late nineties called: The Ocean Room. It was a wooden box with a stairwell also plywood leading up to a window with a tv inside and a VHS player on automatic rewind and a video of a small plaster building structure being washed over with waves on the shoreline of Whale Beach on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. I have remade it from plaster and Gyprock and instead of having a tv inside there shall be a video projector and the video shall be projected out onto a simple projection screen and the sculpture shall sit on top of a wooden IKEA trestle table.

There shall be two other beach kart sculptures with the Chinese TEMU karts and a simple plaster structure in one on Kmart pillows and fifteen pairs of Converse high top sneakers in the second all size ten and in multiple colours. The kart with the shoes shall have four neon signs on top in different colours and words all affirmations of Buddha teachings also from TEMU. This sculpture brings together the Chinese brand TEMU karts and Converse that says All-Star as in my mind, All-Star team as I think no person is an island and is part of a team or community. The idea is that Chinese and American products and trade operate together for global prosperity and world peace.

The kart withy the pillows and plaster structure are about how my small apartment by the beach and the beach across the road help me with beach walking and drawing, writing and watching movies, eating and sleeping and come together to fuel my creativity and meditative living in the now practice.
There are two big drawings one black on white and one white on black with attempts at humour around my reverence for grandmothers.

There shall be two video projectors on an IKEA trestle table with eight of my best beach video performances from the past year and a half edited together silently. The two projections show the same videos out of sync side by side. Also titled: Competing to be the World’s Greatest Grandmother.
There shall also be twenty fruit and veg boxes with drawings in them mainly with Sharpie pens and Mont Marte colour pencils on the back of cut up Woolworths bags. Four of the boxes shall have light globes at the top and a big blue neon sign saying compassion.
“In order to carry a positive action, we must develop here a positive vision. “
Dalai Lama (So; kind and funny and wise)
In conclusion I have written a lot about the hidden meanings in my exhibition but I hope that the audience tries to ignore this and make up their own mind about the meaning of the artwork. I hope there is a mixture of humour and thoughtful rumination in this experience.




