subduction (2026)
Subduction: An exhibition by Perdita Phillips & Tom Sevil (aka Civil)
Baldessin Studio State Library of Victoria Fellows Exhibition
5 March – 27 March 2026 Print Council of Australia Gallery, Studio 2 Guild, 152 Sturt St
Southbank VIC 3006
Subduction takes its name from a geological process: the slow, slipping of one tectonic plate beneath another. It is a movement that is largely unseen, felt only through pressure, fracture, and eventual transformation. In this exhibition, Perdita Phillips and Tom Sevil draw on that idea as both method and metaphor. Their work explores ecological strain and anticolonial histories—forces that operate over time, shaping landscapes and lives long after the initial impact. What is pushed below the surface is never gone; it stains, compresses, mutates, and re-emerges in altered form.
Interview with Perdita Phillips and Tom Sevil for Print Council of Australia blog https://www.printcouncil.org.au/subduction/
Artist Statement: Lithic Traces in the Archive
Beginning by following traces of the geological in the photographic archive, Lithic Traces in the Archive delved underground, seeking strata, cracks and vibrations in the fabric of the State Library Victoria. My exploration began with a very early compendium of proofs for geological maps that were made by Alfred R C Selwyn (director of the Geological Survey of Victoria from 1852 to 1869) and his team, that mapped many areas of the state, including the Central Goldfields. Prior to starting the fellowship, I had not physically seen these maps, so that set the tone for opening up my creative process to chance and discovery. The atlas was fascinating in the way that it included hachures and handwritten annotations and showed the different steps involving engraving and lithography in the manual printing of a map.
In my search for the ‘picturing’ of deep time, other images of rocks and underground all presented the lithic as quite passive. I speculated on what rocks would think of ‘being collected’ or ‘pictured’ and what might they say if they had the possibility to speak? That’s why two other aspects—the actual materials of construction of the Library—and the places that were pictured in the collection—turned around my thinking and making. The building stones ‘pressed’ upon me, deep in the catacombs. I recorded the creaks and groans of the Elephant Lift and the maintenance spaces hidden from public view. The 150-year-old traces of gold mining present today in ‘up-side-down country’ on Dja Dja Wurrung lands, were turned into stereographs. As the Library’s physical spaces were entangled with the lived landscapes of the central highlands of Victoria, rock materiality of the more-than-human volcanics, and the still visible scars of extraction, became counterpoints to colonialist storytelling.
The ecological strategy of decentring the human was amplified by printing over, staining, dyeing and decaying found maps, books and book-forms. Mineral life was brought back in, in the form of peridotite xenoliths (fragments of the mantle from deep within the earth that have been brought up to the surface by Victoria’s volcanos). Library dust has been collected. Moss grows on library catalogue cards that have been decaying for thirty years. Uneasy with perpetuating oppression, knowledge is subject to decay and symbolic systems are counterposed and overprinted, attuning to lithic traces in the archive.
You are invited to look at the stereographs and please water the moss.
Photography and research for this project was taken on Dja Dja Wurrung, Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong/Boon Wurrung countries of the Kulin Nation.