Unchained Melody by Conor Clarke for SCAPE Public Art Season 2019

Conor Clarke Unchained Melody 2019. Image: video still, courtesy of Christchurch City Libraries and SCAPE Public Art.

Named after the Righteous Brothers’ hit song, Conor Clarke’s Unchained Melody was as full of longing as the lyrics of the original. But, rather than the romantic desire for a lover, the object of fantasy was nature.

Unchained Melody continued Clarke’s long interest in water; especially the clash between the reality of water hard at work in our cities and the persistent idea of nature as elsewhere and sublime. The artwork began as audio, capturing water in motion as infrastructure – the sounds of river outfalls, waterfalls, storm water drains and wastewater systems. In the two accompanying videos water and metal collide. The rapids of a constructed waterfall played across a hand encased in a chain mail glove, while in the other video hands endlessly untangled a series of knotted chains.

Clarke evoked the colonial surveyor’s chain, which carved up land for settlers and broke apart traditional links of whakapapa and knowledge. The bundle of chains also paid tribute to the artist’s grandmother, recalling the ritual of unraveling and distributing her jewellery collection after her death. Complex and contradictory connections between people, nature and things came to the fore. Unchained Melody called for ‘the need to untangle,’ the artist says, ‘to unlearn what Romanticism taught us about feeling separate from nature’.