
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).
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.