Starfruit and Starfruit Fruiterer by Jacquelyn Greenbank for SCAPE Public Art Season 2020 

IMAGE: Jacquelyn Greenbank, Starfruit and Starfruit Fruiterer, 2020. Image courtesy of Jacquelyn Greenbank and SCAPE Public Art. Photo by Heather Milne. 

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

Stretching across two street sites – one real, at 130 Armagh Street, and one recreated within Canterbury Museum’s Christchurch Street, early in the New Year – Jacquelyn Greenbank’s Starfruit and Starfruit Fruiterer addressed perceived gaps in the city’s history and the alienation of a fractured identity in a world of preconceived cultural assumptions.  

The place where this flag stands is the approximate site of a Chinese greengrocer, the Starfruit Fruiterer that operated during the 1940s and 1950s. Greenbank’s work, in unmissable purple, draws attention to this now vacant site. We are used to encountering flags in official contexts, authoritatively marking territory, place, or defining ownership. Greenbank’s flags challenge this standard reading. Here the flag, a self-portrait with the artist’s face merged into a starfruit, is used to question identity; creating a human-fruit hybrid of sorts. Look closely at the top of the flagpole – the finial, usually a place for a decorative flourish that takes on the appearance or form of the dominant culture is a cast purple broccoli. 

Greenbank has used banners and flags throughout her career, employing a range of symbols, colours, and formats to create sometimes mysterious combinations that reference real and imagined identities. The use of flags creates an opportunity to reflect on our own culture and identity; empowering us, in Jacquelyn’s words, to “come together, to raise a banner, adorn the garb and burn candles, and join the mystical cult of vegetables and dim sum and what not.”