If you call it a picnic, it’s a picnic. Who is to argue with Rosalie Gascoigne when she explained her sculpture is based on an actual picnic organized by James Mollison. It was held on a mountain on a windy day. So, the wire netting captures air; the birds represent kangaroos, and the glass jars suggest what is ephemeral.
In 1985, Gascoigne discussed Jim’s Picnic as an almost incoherent fantasy: This one is called Jim’s Picnic. It was about a picnic and it was meant to be impractical, it was on a windy day on top of a mountain. This was an actual picnic. The wire netting I have used is a pretty sort of netting. It gives a good visual reading; in feel, it is mountain air. I was enclosing air with those spaces. The grass stuck in the bottles is as ephemeral as you can get, and it was to show this awful – it wasn’t awful, it was a marvellous impractical picnic with the clouds coming over, the kangaroos hopping up and down. The kangaroos are the parrots, if you can bear the transition, but that was the life element in it and it was to capture the actual event. What are the parrots made of? You haven’t been in the supermarket lately. You can get as many parrots as the kind girls in the check-out will let you by taking the Arnott’s boxes. They haven’t got the variety they used to have. You used to be able to get blue ones and red ones and I have had a great store of them and for me they’re almost the animal in the landscape as Ned Kelly is to Nolan. I use them a lot.
See Rosalie Gascoigne. Jim’s Picnic (1975); https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/21362/lot/25/