living art

Capturing the launch of the LIVING ART publication and accompanying workshops was both a privilege and a pleasure. The catalogue publication was exquisitely designed by Anna Zagala and edited by Dr Suzie Fraser from COVA at University of Melbourne. It documents and explores the need for creative-led, common spaces to strengthen community resilience using the community of Dookie in regional Victoria as the model.

I hovered around capturing glimpses and moments of the workshops that drew on the expertise of the project’s various participants. The workshops encompassed knowledge of seed banks, native foods and grasses, place-specific geology and Indigenous perspectives on caring for Country.

An expansive conversation between Yorta Yorta man Neville Atkinson and Dookie archaeologist Gaye Sutherland was very moving - having worked side-by-side for decades they shared their knowledge and experience of place, the ancient rocks and prized greenstone.

a rather gross materialism

As Linden Gallery’s writer-in-residence, Dr Lucinda Strahan (aka expanded Non/FICTION expert, writer, researcher, lecturer) harnessed the radical energy, DIY ethos and countercultural spirit of punk and feminism for her exhibition “a rather gross materialism”. Through a playful process she calls “poetic erasure” she reinterpreted source text from the colonial record The Webbs’ Australian Diary 1898 using collage and text pairing to remake, reimagine and subvert the subjectivities and cultural narratives of the diary. Strahan then compiled a suite of xeroxed posters that extended beyond the gallery walls and were pasted up and appeared outdoors on billboards scattered around St Kilda.

As she explains:

“I was first drawn to the voice of Beatrice Webb when she was quoted in another historical text, saying of the “well-to-do women” of Australia: “certainly these colonial women are in an unpleasant stage of development…vapid in talk without public spirit or intellectual sympathies” they were “uncommonly inferior to the men” and “the least worthy product of Australia”. The weird misogyny of this statement felt familiar and historically true, and its absurd almost Wildean turn of phrase made me laugh out loud. I immediately started searching for the source text.

Beatrice and Sidney Webb were well-known British public intellectuals. They were socialists and labour reformers; affluent leftists who co-founded the London School of Economics. The Webbs took great interest in the colonial “experiment”, and during their journey to Australia in 1898, met and spoke with almost all the leading political and social figures of the time. The Webbs’ Australian Diary 1898 is their travel journal, published posthumously in the 1950s.

The diary is, as I had hoped, a gold mine of found-words. Beatrice Webb’s impressions of Australian society, its ruling class, its political leaders and industrial barons, are expressed in anachronistic language that frequently tips into camp. But her expertise as a sociologist and political scientist means that even her blatant bad-moodism carries historical weight.

As it turns out, it was not just the wealthy colonial women who gave Beatrice Webb the shits during her visit. Almost everything else did too. As I worked with the text of the diary, I found myself identifying with her cranky observations about the “rather gross” materialism of the emerging society—exceedingly rich and anti-intellectual, gorging on mining, led by dull men. Her frequent “relapse into irritability” reminded me of my own despairing moments over the contemporary social and political climate. In this way I began to identify with Beatrice Webb’s voice, and her straight-talking insults even as I disagreed with her views on women, on race and her obvious acceptance of the colony as ‘terra nullius’.”

I was lucky enough to document Lucinda (and her spunky chihuahua Gina) in the early days of the project as she cut and compiled the collages and once again a little further down the track when the paste ups appeared in the local neighbourhood.

river banners

Documenting Sarah Tomasetti’s river banners for the Birrarung: On The River exhibition at Chapman and Bailey. The exhibition featured a mix of professional artists and the wider community of Birrarung devotees in response to living and working on the river. Sarah invited me to photograph the de-install which was a wonderful way to clock the movement and texture of the pieces.

“Breaststroke is perfect for wild-water swimming. With eyes at water level, it allows me to take everything in. I look up to the Native Golden Wattles and Yarra gums growing impossibly out of the rocky cliffs on the other side of the river. Bobbing across the water’s surface are thousands of golden sweet-smelling flower heads from the wattles. It’s like a starry, starry night-sky. A pair of Snow Geese are spotted in the distance gathering insects in the reeds, while a raft of Pacific black-ducks glide by and attempt to herd us into shore.”

Carolyn Tate

composting... (full title truncated)

I documented Emily Simek’s VCA Master of Contemporary Art Graduation Exhibition - “Composting… (full title truncated).

In Emily’s words:

“Composting (full title truncated) is a body of work co-created with a worm-farm compost system. In this practice, digital technologies intra-act within nutrient cycles at the site of the compost heap. Worms ingest organic waste to form piles of soft humus. A contact microphone transcribes the workings of the worms into a textural soundscape. Microscopic footage of compost materials trace decomposition through the slippage of pixels in a video projection. The skins of vegetables are reconstituted as digital renders that blossom into fragrant soft sculptures. These are all processes in the cross-pollination of matter in a techno-compost system. Together they explore the potentialities of closed-loop systems in permaculture design for art-making practices.”

blackboard!

I was privileged to document Michelle Destefano VCA Contemporary Art Graduation Exhibition - “Blackboard!”

In Michelle’s words:

“Blackboard! evolved from a series of performances that used my story of being a Deaf person who has experienced a form of oppression called ‘audism’ and forced ‘oralism’. Audism is the attitude of people who want Deaf people to speak and not use sign, or who ignore Deaf people’s communication needs. This installation work is informed by ongoing issues for the Deaf community, despite Auslan being our true and most accepted language. Blackboard! discusses the ‘Tickle Talker’, an electrical-shock device forced onto me from 1988 to 1991, to ‘help me learn to ‘hear’ through shocks to my fingers. This work advocates for decolonisation of the Deaf community through increased awareness of Deaf issues around access, audism and displacement of the Deaf community.”

rupture, repattern, repair

I documented Claire Bridge’s VCA Master of Contemporary Art Graduation Exhibition - “rupture: repattern: repair”.

A description of the exhibition in her words:

“My work fuses the mythic and grotesque. I engage with practices of rupture, repatterning and repair to address concerns for voice, power and violence. Drawing on ancestral transmissions and a synthesis of my Indian-Assamese and Anglo-European heritage, I re-signify and empower the wounded, monstrous feminine through works framed by the mythologies of Medusa, Lilith, Shakti and Kali. Resisting Western tendencies to deny violence and erase scars, my work witnesses the wounded psyche and soma through visible ruptures and tactile fragmentations. Embedded within processes, objects and materials are gestures of repair to personal and collective wounds, opening ruptures of transformational potential and plasticity. In response to systemic male violence against women, repair is a vital practice of cultural resistance, continuity and future-making.”