MEG WILSON, ASHTON MALCOLM, JOSIE WERE (SA) - TEAM TRAMPOLINE

Opening - 5:30 PM - Wednesday, 3rd February

Artist Talks - 6:00pm

Running - 4th February 2016 - 20 February 2016

The trampoline is somewhat of a staple in the Australian backyard. The rules of the sport change from yard to yard depending on the number and hierarchy of siblings and the variety of domestic props that become makeshift sporting apparatus.

Demanding of technical excellence, courage, strength, discipline and aesthetic beauty, trampoline at an elite level is certainly a sport to be admired. Sequences of minutely detailed actions align, all the while navigating spatial orientation. As the athlete bounds from the trampoline, they are in a weightless free fall condition. It is free fall in an orderly and regimented fashion.

Contradictory to the elegance displayed in the execution of their craft, is the rigor and anguish that accompanies the arduous routine of the athlete. Remember the freedom you felt freefalling or ‘flying’ on your backyard trampoline? For an elite trampolinist that feeling barely registers. Instead they allow the body to automatically take over, for they have mentally and physically rehearsed an act a thousand times before.

Always present in the mind of the trampolinist is the potential risk of SPECTACULAR FAILURE!

Unlike other gymnastic disciplines, it is near impossible to claw your way back from a mistake in trampoline. Every bounce increases likelihood of error and the margin for error is infinitesimal. If the hips or shoulders shift in front of the feet, all control may be lost and the athlete’s flight path drifts all over the trampoline bed.

Sometimes off it.

Under constant scrutiny of the coach, the audience, the parents and perhaps more dangerously so, one’s own mind, the pressure and constant striving for a level of perfection that is infinitely just out of grasp due to a continually shifting target, must be utterly destroying to ones’ sense of accomplishment and worth.

Then what of the athlete that spends their life in pursuit of this ultimate glory only to ever ‘come close’? To have a taste, but to never (in their mind), actually achieve?