Janet Burchill, Jennifer McCamley and Tim Jones

Janet Burchill
Australian, born 1955

Jennifer McCamley
Australian, born 1957

Tim Jones
Australian, born 1962

Steinhead / The body of my cat as a moonflower / In the country 2000
screenprint, fibre tipped pen, pencil, watercolour, ink, synthetic polymer paint, artist's pigment and wood engraving
Geelong Gallery
Gift of Bendigo Art Gallery, 2007
Courtesy of the artists

This collaborative work is a contemporary example of the ‘exquisite corpse’: a drawing exercise developed in 1925 by European Surrealist artists. Inspired by traditional parlour games, an exquisite corpse was created by folding a piece of paper horizontally into a concertina, onto which, in turn, each member of a group drew a part of a body without being able to see what others had drawn on the paper.

Driven by the Surrealists’ interest in unconscious and random processes of creativity, exquisite corpses demonstrate the effects of juxtaposition and chance as critical artistic forces. The resulting bodies, as these two collaborative works reveal, are often strange creations of contrasting or even impossible elements.