Bicycle Race 1978

Bicycle Race 1978 is a video transferred and edited from footage shot on four Super 8 cameras used to document a performance in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1978. The work was staged twice; the second time in Canberra as part of the performance art festival ACT 1.

At the core of Bicycle Race is a drawing – of a double helix a twisted ladder structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), made with forty kilograms of flour, drawn on a bitumen roadway. Francis Crick and James Watson discovered DNA in 1953. Rosalind Franklin, an English chemist and X-ray crystallographer, whose image ‘photo 51’2 was critical to realising the double helix form. The transformative discovery of DNA marks the advent of contemporary biology. The image of its elegant but dynamic coil, constantly winding and unwinding, is today found everywhere: in culture, advertising, and art, as much as it is in science. The double helix drawn in flour demarcated the cyclists’ path; Bicycle Race explores the tension between structure and chaos, impulse, and abstraction.