Artist-in-residence Perdita Phillips has become embedded in the Kalgoorlie-Boulder community throughout her stay at Museum of the Goldfields.
Dr Perdita Phillips is an Australian artist working with environmental issues and social change since 1991. Born in Perth/Boorloo, she has long concerned herself with interactions between human and nonhuman worlds.
Her Activating Collections project titled Terrane involves working between the historic woodlines and ecological histories of Kalgoorlie-Boulder, exploring mineral forms, and representations of plants and animals in the Dwyer and Mackay photographic collection of the Western Australian Museum.
The Dwyer and Mackay Photographic Collection contains thousands of images of the Goldfields. Dating back to the late 1800s, J.J. Dwyer was a commercially successful portrait photographer who maintained an interest in documenting Kalgoorlie and Goldfields life, capturing social events, landscapes and industrial relations, even taking photographs of underground mines. In 1917 Dwyer sold his studio to fellow photographer Thomas Mackay, who ran the studio until 1945.
For Perdita, it is the exploration of our connection to this Earth, and the way that both the Earth and humans record memories, that Terrane is centred upon.
“This project has at its heart the challenge of looking at the past in a different way. It is about time and scale and earth. Most of the people in the photos of J.J. Dwyer and Thomas Mackay are long past, their traces reach us in the present, along with the distortions of time that are evident in the scratches, blotches, broken plates and fogged imperfections. But looking into Deep Time, to the time of land creation, makes these records so much about the surface — and our present-day existence — fleeting. For a non-geologist it is hard to perceive these deeper memories, so part of the process has been to try and glimpse this past that is beneath our feet [in Kalgoorlie] through field visits. As a settler colonist, I try to negotiate (as best I can) the destruction and disjunction that today’s traditional owners’ experience, that echoes down the last 130 years.“
While Perdita has worked across a huge range of mediums (sculpture, digital art, installations, and spatial sound to name just a few), for Terrane she has turned her attention to alternative photographic techniques and the use of natural materials. Throughout her residency, Perdita has hosted multiple cyanotype making workshops and will continue to research and experiment with processes to develop a body of work.
Here are some highlights from her explorations so far…
All images and captions courtesy Perdita Phillips’ Instagram (@PerditaPhillips).
When felsic and mafic flows combine, a layer of dark laterite (and some weird chocolate-coloured soil wash) on top and… you get rocky road!
A bit of a small scale image but an amazing location.
…last three days very hectic in the field with geology, (unsuccessful*) rephotography of Dwyer and Mackay images and woodlines featuring.
*a combination of a very deep creek crossing (more than the Kia could cope with) and long weekend shooters.
A new spin on Hannan Street with Kalgoorlie Art cyanotypes outside of Maker Stribe Studio. Incredibly hard-working artists and teachers coming up with experimental prints as part of Intro To Cyanotypes workshop. This time the sun finally shone at midday!
Whilst looking for what perhaps isn’t there in the Dwyer and Mackay photography collection in the Museum of the Goldfields (representations of animal/plant/lithic others are few and far between) I came across references to breathing and fogged negatives (where bodies arise out of grey fog).
I am making connections to present day dust conditions so maybe this archive research is useful.
In the meantime just did some quick explorations with local eucalyptus bark tannin (the red-brown colour), watercolour and pencil.
Catalogue details: Front and back views of vajen-bader breathing apparatus (J.J. Dwyer, 1910).
H/S Group Portrait of man in a suit, teenage girl wearing school uniform, boy wearing shirt, blazer with badge; ‘Sheehan’.
well hello slippery gimlet! 🍑
So far I have taken around 5,000 or so photos either in the Goldfields or of images in various collections. I keep coming back to trees, rocks, presence and absence. This is a place called Slippery Gimlet (an old mine site) near Ora Banda — where there is slipperiness between bodies and places.
It poured on the weekend and I left my camera in the car but here are some photos courtesy of Museum of the Goldfields of the children’s workshop exploring cyanotypes.
Thank you to the participants and Peta for your help on the day!
How do you take lithic thinking seriously? Are these rocks prisoners or exhibitionists?
For technical reasons, this part of the Terrane Residency hasn’t worked yet, so I will have to go back and try again.
Hope today was a turn for the better
#LuckyStar
#HannansLake
tiny little test print Red cloud (trophy) will be on sale in the Footings group show at Nyisztor Studio…
I will be showing studio tests and cyanotypes from the Terrane Project where I have been exploring extractivism, revegetation and nonhuman representations in the collection(s) of the Museum of the Goldfields in Kalgoorlie-Boulder/Karlkurla on unceded First Nations land.
A selection of works produced for the Terrane Project can be seen at group exhibition Footings on until October 1, 2023 at Nyisztor Studio, Palmyra. To find out more about Perdita Phillips, visit perditaphillips.com and follow her on Instagram @PerditaPhillips.