Gippsland › Latest news › Latrobe Local News

The Bridge of No Return’ exhibition at Latrobe Regional Gallery

Lyndal Jones at Latrobe Regional Gallery.

By Portal Admin - 17th March 2019 - Back to News

Melbourne resident and award winning artist Lyndal Jones who practises in a range of mediums, including performance, installation and socially engaging projects will bring her latest project ‘The Bridge of No Return’" to Latrobe Regional Gallery.

Jones addresses socially important themes through very long term projects including ‘The Avoca Project’. The Avoca Project was a decade long installation in central Victoria addressing the politics of a more interdependent ecology in the face of climate change.

Jones now brings her photographic installations to Latrobe Regional Gallery as she explores a small, white, wooden bridge crosses the demarcation line between North and South Korea in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) at the 38th parallel north. When prisoners of war from the Korean War were returned to North Korea in 1953, they were told that, once they walked over this bridge, they could never return. The bridge thus became known as ‘The Bridge of No Return’.

‘The Bridge of No Return’ was pointed out by a US soldier to a group of 40 international artists, including Lyndal Jones, during a special tour of the DMZ as part of research for the exhibition DMZ 2005 on the South Korean border curated by Yu Yeon Kim.

After hearing the story, Jones made a video installation she called "The Axe Murder Incident’ for the exhibition. This work included recordings of birdsong from Avoca in central Victoria (the site of The Avoca Project, her 15 year work on climate change*) that she had taken to South Korea as a contribution to the bird sanctuary that the DMZ had famously become. This was the first work of The Avoca Project.

Jones brought back the audio recording of the US soldier telling the story of the DMZ border to create a work about borders in Australia. Her resulting artwork, The Bridge of No Return, was first shown at Anna Schwartz Gallery in 2008 as another contribution of The Avoca Project.

‘The Bridge of No Return’ by Lyndal Jones will be on display until 24 March 2019.


Lyndal Jones, Bridge of No Return, 2008, (image from installation at Latrobe Regional Gallery), photographs mounted on aluminium, pine stands, sandbags, timber platform, audio program (digital, 10 mins), headphones. Dimensions variable. Collection of the artist.

Source: www.gippsland.com

Published by: support@gippsland.com