Lithic Traces in the Archive
Anticipatory archive: mapping lithic traces from colonial pasts to spectral/regenerative futures
Lithic Traces in the Archive (2024-2026) explored the past, and creatively visualised yet-to-be-realised environmental futures. Working with early cartographic material and photographs in the collection, the aim of the project was to create a series of prints in book format that explore how land, rocks, and the underground were pictured in historic images. The visual language of historic cartographic hachures, annotations, ‘blank’ spaces on maps, and double images (stereographs), inspired new stratigraphic sequences in book art form. Phillips’ photographs and material investigations in the Victorian Goldfields since 2024 added additional layers of place to the project. Photogravure, chine-collé over found maps collected by the artist, and other printmaking techniques were used to create works exhibited in Subduction, A volcano in my backyard? and Sydney Contemporary.
The Tate Adams Memorial Residency at Baldessin Studio was a State Library of Victoria Creative Fellowship 2024-2025. Whilst in Victoria I was a guest on unceaded Dja Dja Wurrung, Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and Bunurong lands. The State Library Victoria contains knowledge from traditional lands of all the Victorian Aboriginal clans and other cultural groups around Australia.
State Library Victoria acknowledges the traditional lands of all the Victorian Aboriginal clans, and their cultural practices and knowledge systems.
We recognise that our collections hold traditional cultural knowledge belonging to Indigenous communities in Victoria and around the country. We support communities to protect the integrity of this information, gathered from their Ancestors in the colonial period.
We pay our respects to their Elders, past and present, who have handed down these systems of practice to each new generation for millennia.