Thursday, 3 April 2025
The Director General of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao : Miren Arzalluz
Abandoibarra Etorbidea, 2, 48009 Bilbao
From :Luke Foster
Dear Miren ,
I am an Australian artist and I recently sent my latest zine to you with a video on a USB stick. This time I am sending a box of art with installation instructions. Perhaps it shall never get made but I try lol.
The title of it is: My Protectors are Angels and Saints / I Wish I Could Go Back in Time to be Saint Francis’s Cat. I have divided the installation into seven parts so I shall explain it in parts:
- An IKEA wooden trestle table with a white top and video projector on top projecting a video called: Competing to be the Worlds Greatest Grandmother which I showed recently at a solo show in Australia by the same name of this video. The rationale is as follows:
“Stop drawing yourself and use colour.”
My mum Maria
The theme of this DVD is a mix up of the best beach performances mainly over the last few years took centre place in my solo show: Competing to be the World’s Greatest Grandmother. There is also a simple video of a small plaster building being washed over by waves. The video is silent.
“We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves”
Dalai Lama
The ideas in the video in many ways reflect my study of the Dalai Lamas philosophy particularly around compassion for all people and animals and nature.
“Find happiness in making others happy.”
Mary MacKillop
I try to keep a sense of humour in my art mixed with serious issues so I hope my art makes others happy.
“All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.”
St. Francis Of Assisi,
In conclusion as I always write one should choose one’s role models carefully as that is how one becomes. I try to have an equal mixture of female and male role models.
Next to it a blue Temu neon that says scaredy-cat that is the same as a neon going in my next show in Australia and the show is called: Sometimes I am a Scaredy-cat but when I think I am the Dalai Lamas cat I feel safe and happy. It is to be 47cm long.
- Two Ikea trestle tables the same as in part 1 the first with an unpainted plywood box 45cm by 36cm and 20cm deep with many of the soldier ink drawings in it. The drawings are on the back of cut up Woolworths bags a big grocery franchise in Australia. Next to it white gloves so the audience can look through them. I love Aussie soldiers in particular for many reasons but mainly because they provide security for aid agencies no matter where the need is greatest.
The second table should have fifteen high top Converse and fifteen white high tops all size ten on it in a random pile and a 47cm white Temu neon saying compassion and it should be 47cm long. I like the brand converse as it’s an American and the logo is All-Star and I feel nothing is done by an individual alone but as part of a team and the neon shows how that happens literally by using compassion.
- Best 14 drawings of soldiers in white box frames with a float mount and 2cm border hung randomly not in a line. Chosen by Miren Arzalluz.
- Three best portrait photos from the USB stick blown up A0 size: with white box frames. My favourite a one called Literally Trying to Become the Fifteen Dalai Lama. Its rationale:
“Old friends pass away, new friends appear. It is just like the days. An old day passes, a new day arrives. The important thing is to make it meaningful: a meaningful friend – or a meaningful day.”
Dalai Lama
When we shot this it was a sunny day and me and Yannick did a photo shoot of me dressed as the Dalai Lama reading a book of original drawings bound in a red book titled: “Literally Trying to Become the 15th Dalai Lama.”
I was wearing brand new blue Vans shoes. I really love the Dalai Lama a lot and my mum taught me not to play favourites but I have a particular soft spot for the Dalai Lama and Pope Francis.
“We must restore hope to young people, help the old, be open to the future, spread love. Be poor among the poor. We need to include the excluded and preach peace.”
Pope Francis
The video is going in an installation for the amazing former Australian Labor PM Kevin Rudd.
“Australia is a nation of compassion. Courage and compassion. And the third of these great values: resilience.”
Kevin Rudd
- The best landscape photos AO size with a white box frame chosen from the USB stick by Miren Arzalluz. My favourite one is simply called “World Peace” and the rationale is as follows:
“Only through compassion and inner peace, can one spread peace in the world. Inner peace leads to a peaceful individual and then this peaceful individual can build a peaceful family, then a peaceful community, then a peaceful world,”
Dalai Lama
I think if anyone can mediate peace in the world then it’s the Dalai Lama. My video and photos shot by Yannick Soyez are about the connection between world peace and saving the environment particularly the elephants which are an endangered species in Africa and Asia.
“There is mystery behind that masked grey visage, and ancient life force, delicate and mighty, awesome and enchanted, commanding the silence ordinarily reserved for mountain peaks, great fires, and the sea.”
~ Peter Matthiessen
I love this quote about the nobility of elephants. When I was in Pondicherry India over twenty years ago, I saw a beautiful elephant in the street and I felt happy as I knew that elephants in India are considered signs of good luck.
It might seem like a tenuous connection but if we look after the environment and animals, trees and plants in it then we also save the planet as much as having a peaceful community.
- One hundred and eighty women’s Temu straw hats in a random pile on the floor.: Women’s straw sun hats wide brim Panama beach hats with wind lanyard with hat rest reinforcement: ( 60 -coffee brown), (60-black) and (60 khaki).
On top of the women’s hats a white Temu neon in white saying Attempts at Humour.: 1.5 m. The rationale is as follows.
I think the way forward for all people is for women to have lots and lots of metaphorical hats so there is a balance of male and female energy and my favourite teachers from school were ones who had a smile on their face all the time and making jokes. A strong female role model for me is the late Australian Catholic Saint Mary MacKillop.
“’Never see a need without trying to do something about it. ‘
Mary MacKillop
This is a fantastic quote by Mary and I feel the strongest women in the world act like this.
- A glass vitrine cabinet with metal legs 1.2m filled with sixty American baseball caps of all different teams and colours and on top of them twenty-five powered light globes. The rationale is that it’s the many teams of geniuses in America now and in the past who have achieved many amazing things as a team such as landing man on the moon, inventing the Internet and Voyager space explorers and a rover on Mars.
In conclusion there is many different ideas in this installation and I always wonder if I should do this as I haven’t kept count but sent out maybe sixty boxes like this.
Cheers Luke Foster