The Purple Onion

The Purple Onion is a research project, based on the first LGBTIQ café & club in Sydney, Australia. Material was gathered on queer history in Australia, through photographs, drawings and media articles from the local council and from the first homosexual venue known as Kens at Kensington. With this accumulation of material a sculptural and photographic installation was made to commemorate the building, its functions and the underground community it served as this community edges on becoming a part of the mainstream and it history disappears. Through photography and sculpture the building is monumentalised and its history is traced and embedded into our culture using a photographic and sculptural language. Other artists who have produced projects based on research to make monuments to a social history of a site and have used photography and sculpture as their outcome is Vangelis Vlahos, Thomas Demand, Thomas Hirscchorn and Christian Boltanski. This work has become new knowledge in the field of contemporary photography, sculpture and installation as it attempts to trace an aspect of history using a conceptual framework that is explicitly interested in retailing a particular narrative about the homosexual community using a compressed and distilled language triggered through research. Material is gathered and used as instructions and a guide to create a structures and images of Kens at Kensington formerly known as The Purple Onion as a commemoration of a homosexual Australian past. http://tcbartinc.org.au/the-purple-onion/