National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Home Sweet Home

PF: Dallas would primarily be a visual artist; a painter, but every now and again he’s made models, and in an age today of model-making, they are very, very crude. But to me that sense of crudeness is not a criticism, it’s something that I particularly enjoy. And in Dallas’ work we’ve got a doll that he’s made, or, a figure of a man in the scale of a doll, and then just coated it; covered it with fake fur. And it’s got an ape-like look to it, and yet it’s obviously one of us. It’s quite an unnerving piece, because everything about it is so ‘bad’, and yet there’s a magic that comes through, where it makes us think about the chain of being we might be in, and the idea of the ‘missing link’, and this well could be the ‘missing link’. It’s a piece that’s got quite an intensity, and a focus that takes you into it, and again, it’s just standing there on its plinth, and yet its quite alive to movement, and yet at the same time it seems to be anchored there — it’s almost as though it’s been put back on the shelf,