MARCH – APRIL 2024

Umpires adjudicate in games of cricket and Australian Rules football. The two codes share a related development in the mid nineteenth century. In other sports the role is often referred to as referees. Set gestures accompanying on-field decisions obviously enhance the sense of choreography, as do uniforms. This focus on social role is a key strand to much of my work. Unlike previous figure-based series, such as Activists and Your Turn, the performances are not spontaneous or especially individual. Unlike previous series such as Robo or Musing, the figures are not mythic or fictive, but actual persons ensuring compliance with rules of a game. What the theme of Umpires picks out here is a person conspicuously embedded in a role, equally, a role comfortably accommodating personality types.

The games and role have of course gained in attention through mass media. The genre of sports coverage is vast. This aspect extends a key concern with the spectrum from deliberate presentation to representation, from object to picture, in short. The series again uses web-based sources as a starting point to reflect upon the conventions of a genre, the spectrum between photography and digital graphics and multiple strands to realism.

More notes at the bottom of the page.

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The series expands upon a genre in two ways. Firstly, it broadens locations for umpires, in part acknowledging more localised or ‘grass roots’ versions of the games, in part suggesting a carry-over into private lives. Secondly, it broadens graphic means to photographic sources. Not all graphic or stylistic options can be accommodated together without the object losing coherence, not to say credibility. But just where to draw the line between an ‘impression’ and a sober document of content is notoriously difficult. The genre itself allows ambiguity, chance and humour. How to point to these features? Here the series must grow more stylised or abstract and in ways that nevertheless remain beyond or outside established practice. Patrolling these fugitive boundaries is an on-going project.

Finally, greater marketing of the games has brought new pressures for sponsorship and novelty and these are reflected in changes in cut, colour and logos to umpires’ uniforms. While these are part and parcel of the games’ engagement with mass media, I have maintained the traditional white – denoting neutrality – throughout the series, purely as a personal (and perhaps period) preference.

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