“Between us stretches more than two decades of a mythology he has created compressed into paint, mechanics and sound. At the centre, an owl holds an embryo in its talons. To one side, my mother sits astride a double-headed horse with an Edwardian clock embedded in her womb. A snake coils nearby. My younger brother stands by a tree stump with an owlet on his arm and singing bowls at his feet. And here, at the far edge, I hold a ladder that reaches upwards towards a kangaroo skin drum that beats overhead. The installation plays itself. Guitars strum in the belly of its figures. A spinning wheel with brass bells adorns the horse’s bridle. Each sound finds its place within the melody of the clock inside my mother’s womb.” — Indigo Yeldham
Images by Indigo Yeldham
Joshua Yeldham’s Surrender Room is a major site-specific installation commissioned for permanent display within MONA’s new subterranean extension in Hobart, Tasmania.
Bringing together kinetic musical sculptures and hand-carved paintings on board, the work draws on Yeldham’s deeply personal experience of infertility and IVF. MONA’s David Walsh has described the work as a “masterpiece.”
The experience begins beyond the room itself, as the resonant beat of kangaroo-skin drums carries through the underground galleries. Ideas of conception, life and the natural world gradually lead into the central space, where figures representing Yeldham, his wife Jo, daughter Indigo and son Jude sit within a richly carved and painted landscape, connected through sound, movement and recurring symbolic forms.
Owls also appear throughout the installation, extending a motif that has long held spiritual significance within Yeldham’s practice. Here they become closely tied to ideas of fertility, fear, protection and transformation, forming part of the private mythology through which the story of Surrender Room unfolds.
“Surrender Room is a Gesamtkunstwerk (which translates roughly to ‘a total work of art’) — a 10-metre panoramic installation featuring a soundtrack of 42 instruments, sculpture, photography, woodcarving, animation, light installation and painting. At the centre of the work, an owl clutches an embryo in its talons. Surrounding it, the four members of the Yeldham family commune in portrait form. Young Jude tames a baby owl. Indigo holds a ladder that leads upwards and towards a drum beat playing on kangaroo skin overhead. Entombed within Jo’s womb is an Edwardian clock. Time ticks. Instruments appear to play themselves. After spending 20 minutes in the darkened room, immersed in the soundscape of drums, animal calls, the fluttering of wings, clock chimes, and watching the family communicate across two decades of history, I meet Yeldham under a hand-carved archway and tell him I feel like I have just stepped out of the Yeldham family womb.
He traces his fingers across the arch and reveals to me the numbers 508, which are carved into the wood. Yeldham carries the F508 (Delta F508) in the CFTR gene, the leading genetic cause of infertility in men.”
— Ariela Bard
