Summary

This item is one of our 50 Treasures: Celebrating 50 years of James Cook University.

Jonathan McBurnie answers the question 'Why is this significant?'

Robert Preston's 2010 drawings, S'labicated Monument 1 and S'labicated Monument 2, remain confident and lively drawings produced partially on site at James Cook University, but it is the complex registers of meaning that the artist applied to the site that make the works compelling. In many ways, these two drawings sum up (deliberately and otherwise) the complex emotions orbiting what was then the new School of Creative Arts for JCU.

These drawings were made in 2010 for the JCU-hosted exhibition, The Image Space - an attempt to engage curated artists with the University campus as a site or subject. Preston decided upon the then School of Creative Arts as a focus, for several reasons. At the time, the School of Creative Arts (SoCA, as it was known) was a new addition to the Douglas campus. Previously, the lion's share of JCU's creative arts courses were located at the Vincent Campus, which achieved what many separated arts colleges manage: a sense of autonomy, and an insulated vibrance that is often impossible at 'main' campuses. The relocation of the creative arts to the Douglas campus was a contentious decision, and the knowledge that these disciplines have been significantly reduced more recently gives the works an additional register of melancholy.

The title of the work is slightly tongue in cheek – a portmanteau of syllabary, slab and fabricated. Preston notes, 'The title was intended to be discretely sardonic', a response to the self-imposed challenge of responding to a section of architecture with no clear motive beyond a point of interest. In lieu of a clear rationale as to what the architects were referencing with the free standing forms, Preston was free to make his own explorations and explanations, a quest for 'meaning in the meaningless', as his notes reveal.

The forms themselves evoked several reference points for the artist, including monumental avatars of lost cultures such as Stonehenge and the Moai statues of Easter Island. Equating questionable (and unexplained) architectural flourishes to such culturally significant artefacts may appear erroneous, but in view of Preston's goal to find meaning in meaninglessness such conflations make sense. If a new viewer was not told of the Image Space exhibition, and had not seen the forms in person, it would not be unreasonable to read the images as ruins of some description, the remains of a long-lost culture or civilisation, left to be slowly reclaimed by nature.

Perhaps this is the case – a tribute to triumphs, failures and, for an all-too-brief moment, one of the best art schools in the nation.