Peter Atkins, Hume Highway Project, 2010
Atkins has recognised similar things to that which initially interested me, though, despite intervening in the relationship between text and image, is more interested in the signs as abstract images. To my mind, naming each individual works after the text he removed kind of acknowledges that they don’t quite work on their own. That is, the signs become empty signifiers.
For example: one of them is titled Glenrowan which, remembering Ned Kelly and recalling his armour, seems like it could hold a wonderful play and transferral of meaning between text and image, but... I can’t remember which sign it was... and none of them ‘respond’ to that name. (It was the 8th of the nine that I clicked in looking for it and I’ve already forgotten which one it was.)
Also, all acrylic on tarpaulin... why?
The Hume Highway is a route I have traveled frequently since moving to Melbourne from Sydney over a decade ago and I have developed a great fondness for it. In that time I have photographed hundreds of signs along the highway in both directions from Melbourne to Sydney and back again. It was only later, after I had begun this documentation process, that I could look beyond the 'signage', past their words and see them differently from their intended purpose. I had begun to see these signs as simply beautiful abstract forms. Each one in my mind an incidental or unintended abstraction, like enormous roadside Rothko’s. [...] Once you become attuned to the variations of colour within these signs you become aware of another interesting aspect and that is that over time the colours slightly fade, especially the signs that stand without shade, in the harsh sun. Ultimately, there is no standard green, blue, yellow or red but many shades in between. Often, obsolete information on signs will be covered with new sections of coloured metal, rarely matching the original colour, creating a lovely patchwork of evolving history.
