Original Proposal: At Darlinghurst courthouse in 2008, Gordon Wood was found guilty of murdering Caroline Byrne by throwing her from The Gap, a notorious suicide spot in Sydney, Australia. Witnesses claim to have seen a second man at the crime scene but his identity has remained obscure.

The Second Man installation explores the notion of the mysterious other person at the scene of the crime through the elements of text, sound and video. The work considers The Second Man as an unknown, untouchable entity who hovers on the periphery of known events, on the outside of the crime.  His presence is ever looming, always holding the potential to shift the context of events. Carolyn McKay attended the murder trial and composed a poem, The Second Man, evoking a sense of the faceless entity. In her recent body of work Word of Mouth, Carolyn found the fragmented phrases, articulations and utterances from witnesses in murder trials to be akin to unnatural poetic evocations emerging from a violent realm.

This project failed to be realized as the exhibition venue kept reducing the available space and funding … and then my collaborator seemingly lost interest …