High above us dramatic events are unfolding. A large vinyl inflatable by Michael Doolan, Once Upon a Time renders a speeding toy train colliding with a teddy bear. The train engine is racing downhill on a section of timber track, its round wheels distorted into careening, italicised ovals of pure speed. It hits the bear front-on (ooff!), lifting it off the ground. The animal is pinned to the front of the train, moulded to the engine’s striving, forward motion. Steam streams horizontal behind the engine stack, while the end of the line looms. The track is out and both of them seem doomed, bound to plummet together into the open space of the Atrium.

But perhaps the train has just now applied its brakes and instead we are observing the sudden shift in momentum. Violently thrown forward, the bear must cling on instead, its only hope that the seized, screeching wheels of the train, now retarding the forward momentum, will bring them both to a grinding, lurching halt inches from catastrophe. Or perhaps the heroic bear is climbing aboard an out-of-control locomotive at the foot of the hill to save them both from peril. Or perhaps simply to eat the driver.

High drama indeed, a key junction in an undisclosed narrative that might continue in any of several different and familiar directions, a turning point no less, a general momentousness which is studied, carefully honed, and crafted by Doolan, but ultimately, left unresolved. I immediately thought the bear a victim since it is the train – with no smiley face or name such as Thomas – that is more often cast as aggressor, a symbol of the impact of industrial civilisation upon nature-in-retreat (here, the bear pinned to the grill). Already this year, seven bears have been hit and killed by goods-trains traversing the Canadian Rockies. Of course, in 'retaliation' some 27 people have been killed by bears since 2000 in North America (although only 1 in 2010) taking people from cars, cabins and tents, even babies from prams, so why not drivers from trains?

But clearly, Doolan’s is a ‘teddy’ bear, by definition a cute and helpless animal, named in 1902 after American President Theodore Roosevelt. While bear-hunting in Mississippi ‘Teddy’ refused to shoot a bear that had been clubbed and shackled by his aides to ensure Roosevelt was not the only hunter without a prize. Since when, there has been a curious worldwide boom in ‘teddies’.

Such a helpless creature stuck on the tracks in the path of an oncoming train, could also be the work of a villain like Snidely Whiplash, arch enemy of Dudley Doright of the Canadian Mounties, who confessed he could not help himself from tying women to the tracks. Indeed, in one episode he tied every single character including himself to the tracks. And the truth is, between 1874 and 1910 at least 6 people were killed after being tied to railroad tracks in North America. Of course by the time the cartoon aired in 1960 the dastardly act was already a Toyland trope (in TV-world and Toontown too!). Even in 1868 the scene appeared in five different plays at five different London theatres. Cultural historian Nicholas Daly notes that its popularity obviously “put in play some very pressing cultural fears, anxieties, or indeed longings."

The reductive simplicity of toys certainly masks the complex events that inform them. They are a point of convergence for our complex interactions with social institutions, the embodiment of our desire or anxiety as it runs head on into morality or the law, distilled into a single form. And of course the relationship between film or TV and toys is linked to the popularisation and commodification of particular forms, which renders them familiar, even unforgettable.

While in isolation each figure might represent a simple emotional state, in their studied arrangement and recombination within Doolan’s tableau, they act in concert to portray complexity and as often act against type, simultaneously recalling one story while suggesting another. Michael’s expert handling and deep understanding of the subject brings forward and keeps in play these multiple stories. A ceramicist by trade Doolan insists on modelling all his work in clay despite its various final forms – including fibreglass and here, vinyl and air! – because of clay’s malleability.

Every medium has its material peculiarities that are technically mastered to virtuoso effect. While a fired ceramic figure is certainly a hardened and irreversible arrangement of characters and setting – a truly fixed moment in some story – it is, however, also extremely flexible in the process. And remember here the form is translated from hard plastic and soft fabric to clay, and only then to vinyl. The plasticity of clay, perhaps even greater than oils, happily tolerates – indeed cries out for – a nudge here, a little more clay added there, a final tweak. It can be kept cool and damp for days on end while an arm is bent a little more this way, or the body lent a little more that way, until the final bearing of all its parts is perfected, as the maestro intends them.

It is by endless prodding, scraping and pushing that Michael manages to find the perfect ceramic form to maximise the interpretation of events depicted. By which I do not mean the figures are ambiguous or vague, but rather open to different stories and endings simultaneously, such as those above in which the precise tilting arrangement might convey either aggression or regret.  We might describe the capacity of a representation (or single moment) to connect with different stories as ambivalent (or in some cases multivalent). To be clear, it is not because the work is poorly made that we are unsure of its meaning, but because the work is made so well and carefully rendered in its detail that it can mean more than one thing.

But the transition from clay to inflatable in this work is more perplexing. I once thought ceramics was as far from tying balloons as you might get. Indeed, this seemed to be the main point of Jeff Koons’ 1995 Balloon Dog (Blue) where the soft, inflated latex was a foil for the brittle rigidity of fired, mirror-glazed porcelain. Doolan works in the opposite direction, which enables the work to be dramatically upscaled and suspended, a deceptively simple idea, but in talking with Michael, I soon realised the myriad issues: reinforcing the PVC over its 30m length, designing air channels in such an articulated form to ensure its inflation, situating anchor-points for each of its three component parts, and so on.

While working with the tensile strength of clay does not really compare to this balloon engineering, the heaving, shuddering inflatable does somehow reinforce the work’s ambivalence as it shifts a little one way, then the other with a slightly stirring breeze. Until the firing, both materials have the capacity to tolerate slight movements from a general idea or shape. And this physical or material vacillation in Doolan’s work - first one way, then another - corresponds precisely to one ending or another to the story he might be telling (or that we may be inferring). That is, whether the bear is victim, hero or villain. Or for that matter whether Superman – ‘more powerful than a locomotive’ – is circling above us in Federation Square.

This is a fulcrum moment in every sense of the phrase, towards which all narrative denouements tend, and from which all finales will be borne; the moment at which opposing forces are engineered and carefully set to, just so; and the point at which clay hardens just before gravity has its way.

Photography: Lily Feng

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