Heather Milne

Stand Together 2020

Yzza Batac, aged 11 years old, from Merrin School, responded to the brief of Secrets and Lies with
the design of a gigantic periscope decorated with the Black Lives Matter symbol and the New Zealand
flag called Stand Together. This work has been made as a set of periscopes set at viewing height for
both young and old; created with wood, paint and mirrors. She chose to use the periscope as a trope
denoting a piece of spy equipment, she found this to be important because spies expose secrets and
lies. Another layer to the use of the periscope is that such pieces of equipment can play tricks with
the viewers eyes and mind, forcing them to think about what they are actually seeing. A periscope is
an apparatus that is made up of a tube attached to a set of mirrors or prisms, traditionally used in
submarine settings where they allow the viewer to see what they usually could not.