All the King's men

Fiona Hall
Australia
1953

All the King's men
2014/2015
knitted military uniforms, wire, bone, horns, teeth, dice, glass and mixed media
Place made
Adelaide
Medium
knitted military uniforms, wire, bone, horns, teeth, dice, glass and mixed media
Credit line
Gift of Candy Bennett and Edwina Lehmann, Dr Peter and Sandra Dobson, David and Pam McKee, Simon Mordant AM and Catriona Mordant, John Phillips, and Tracey and Michael Whiting through the Art Gallery of South Australia Contemporary Collectors through the Fiona Hall Appeal 2015-16
Accession number
20154S27(1-18)
Signature and date
Not signed. Not dated.
Media category
Sculpture
Collection area
Australian sculptures
Copyright
Courtesy Fiona Hall

  • Military uniforms bearing camouflage prints from several countries are shredded and knitted by the artist into eighteen oversized heads, and then suspended in space. Teeth, bones, horns and found objects adorn the mask-like heads and their ghostly, skeletal bodies. These hollow symbols of war and conflict represent the many who have fallen and those who, in the name of nationhood, are yet to fall.

    All the King’s Men, the central piece in Fiona Hall’s installation, Wrong Way Time, made for the Australian Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, draws its title from the nursery rhyme, Humpty Dumpty. In borrowing this phrase, Hall offers up a grim assessment of how ‘the realities of terrorism, war, climate change, environmental pillage, and economic turmoil have become part of our daily consciousness’.

    Leigh Robb, Curator of Contemporary Art

  • Radical Textiles

    Art Gallery of South Australia, 23 November 2024 – 30 March 2025