St Helliers Street Gallery
The Abbotsford Convent, 1 St Heliers Street, Abbotsford, Melbourne and Surrounds, Queensland 3067CONTACTS:
Phone: (03) 9415-8022
Email: richarddennyaust@yahoo.com
Visit St Helliers Street Gallery
Once whilst meandering through the streets of an unusually snowcovered Marseille, Richard Denny discovered an abandoned box of maps.
Upon further examination it was an extensive collection, holding topographic portrayals of most regions of France. As the overlord of general semantics, Alfred Korzybski, once said: “A map is not the territory”. This highlights the notion that one can peer at a map, and understand the layout of the land via it, but the map will only ever signify the geography of what is there, never accurately describe its nuances.
With any space comes a set of rules and regulations - and with the collision of cultural spheres that permeate the atmosphere the potential for creative ignition is heightened. Due to his lack of French, Denny was effectively a linguistically paralysed mute in the land of Euro-Afro fusion that is Marseille. Maps became his primary interactive tool and fast became a double-edged canvas used to vocalise and navigate his culturally imposed silence.





