Description of the exhibition

Gallery 2 and 1a

The Terrane Project

 Collected Habitats presents recent work from the Terrane Project, that began as an artist in residence at the Museum of the Goldfields in 2023 (an ART ON THE MOVE/Art Gallery of WA touring program). Cyanotypes were created using digital negatives from glass plate photographs taken in the early 1900s by J J Dwyer and Thomas Mackay. On some, slime dump mud or red dust has been applied that links the Museum’s collection with the semi-arid woodland and scrub that surrounds Kalgoorlie-Boulder/Karlkurla. Scenes from the archive include mining, wood harvesting and denuded landscapes. Large banners use the Dwyer and Mackay images and other sources to juxtapose dust, soil, woodlands and geology. Aspects of geology are carried through in the terrane tables and stools where shifting fault lines and other representations of stress, slippage, deformation and strata allude to the contact zones between human and more-than-human worlds.

Gallery 1b

Nine experimental videos about places and ecologies

The videos curated here are derived from places around Western Australia, and Cape Horn in Chile. Common themes include archives and museum collections, the presence of more-than-humans (rocks, trees, landscapes) and floundering attempts to communicate with other beings. Phillips has experimented with using still images (collections found photos, photocopies treated with soil and ochre) and sequential animations with cyanotypes. She uses hydrophones and geophones to extend the possibilities of listening to places. Some works like A forecast of storm (Derbarl Yerrigan), were made nearby (along the Swan River, during Covid), whereas Thataway was performed facing towards Antarctica.

In wheatbelt anticipatory archive I, the artist was given a box of photos of black and white photographs from some time in the late 1950s or early 1960s. Taken from a plane, they are an archive made by humans, for humans. The artist scanned in around 1000 photographs from this accidental archive and set herself the task of unsettling the eye of settler colonialism with a more ecological vision by adding footage and sounds from nature. Similar investigations into archives can be seen in behind, before, below which was made from still images photographed at the Western Australian School of Mines Minerals Museum in Kalgoorlie. This museum portrait contrasts the stillness of a little-known treasure with the sounds of footsteps and geophone recordings of blasts beneath Kalgoorlie. We are placed in the position of an ant gazing up at the giant Wattie or Taxandria juniperina trees at Tjuirtgellong (Lake Seppings) in Albany/Kinjarling. In the more recent Die Back (a collaboration with Annette Nykiel) the past and futures of Collie are considered in relation to the materiality coal from open cut and underground mines.

From 2018 to 2023 the 2.5 metre high sculpture We must catch up existed in a field in Margaret River. In confusing and compromising times, we must take action despite being surrounded by doubt. In this interactive artwork, participants climbed the mountain and sat and talked. The sculpture explored the point of talking through doubt and progressing towards action. Participants experienced a time of slowing down and reflect. On the spring equinox in 2023, the mountain was burnt in an act of return and renewal. You can hear the fractured voices of conversations in the accompanying video.

In varied ways, all of the artworks in Collected Habitats address the need for different and new ways of viewing and acting—and of hinting or indeed constructing new worlds of imagination—against the odds of the contemporary human predicament.

Gallery 1c

Anticipatory terrain (capricious dreams)

Can you imagine what a kangaroo might dream? Or a landscape? Filmed primarily at Thomsons Lake, Perth, Western Australia, this video installation is comprised of two looped videos. At one end of the black box space a loop is playing directly onto a black-painted wall. Darker tones of the video were lost into the twilight and highlights became silvery traces in the darkened space. On the side wall is a shorter loop that shows a night vision view of the lake. Anticipatory terrain is about dreams and nightmares and the night landscape as a place of uncertainty and potential. The video installation contains footage from Perth’s urban wetlands, plotting the shadowy traces of Western Grey Kangaroos, which may or may not inhabit various locations. It sprang from a re-envisaging of Goya’s El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters) where the positions of dreamer and dreams might be reversed and how, along with an ethical commitment to let animals exist in their own worlds, one should also recognise how other animals are essential to our own (entangled) being. Anticipatory terrain (capricious dreams) was commissioned for and exhibited at Another Green World, curated by Andrew Frost for the Western Plains Cultural Centre, Dubbo August-October 2017.