rock love (2024)
Rock love brings together mixed media works responding to the past and present landscapes of the Goldfields. Artist Perdita Phillips has delved into the archives of the Museum of the Goldfields, traced aspects of the woodlines and combined these with the geological nature of the region to create prints, photographs and short animations.
16 to 29 November 2024 at Artgold, Kalgoorlie-Boulder
Artist statement: rock love
The exhibition Rock love developed from a 2023 Artist in Residence called the Terrane Project with the Museum of the Goldfields, (Activating Collections Residency, with Art on the Move). During my time in Kalgoorlie-Boulder/Karlkurla, I explored the links between the historic woodlines, mineral specimens, and the Dwyer and Mackay collection of historic photographs held at the Western Australian Museum, visiting various sites in and around Kalgoorlie. Hesitant (as a guest on unceded land), I looked for traces of the past—and took almost 13,000 photos—seeking out nonhuman communities of rocks, soil, dust, wind, plants, animals and fly-dumping rubbish.
As an artist I am interested in how humans interact with more-than-humans (rocks, animals and plants), searching for the ‘contact zones’ where these occur. Exploring concepts such as ‘deep time’ and ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ I challenge how we see the past as something separate from ourselves. Geological maps and historical photos tell us about what people think are important, but sometimes the most interesting things are those that are overlooked: what appears at the edges of photos or traces of dust and age, absences, and the discarded that surround us.
Over repeated visits and in the studio, I wrestled with how to create visual links between the disparate elements of rock, bush and archive: were there pictures of more-than-humans in the archive; what were the traces of the woodlines left in the landscape; and what ensues when sand and soil are combined with photography? I was fascinated with how the woodcutting (literally) fuelled the mining—which in turn led to photographer J J Dwyer (and later Thomas Mackay) to document the mines—and the social life of the towns. What happens at all these contact zones?
Anyone who has been stuck behind a wide load on Great Eastern Highway knows that equipment and supplies needed for mining are constantly on the move, as are the ores and materials leaving for markets and buyers world-wide. Pits are dug and waste rock dumps grow. The traces of the abandoned woodlines make evident spidery networks of extractivism. Trees regenerate and life flourishes in and between catastrophe. Historically and currently, Kalgoorlie-Boulder/Karlkurla is connected to the local ecologies around it, and to global exchanges of matter and money.
Yet settler Australians live in a time of not only ‘plant blindness’ (overlooking the plants around us and the role they play in the biosphere) but ‘rock blindness’: rarely seeing what is all around us. We can be indifferent to dirt, to what is invisible underground, or to what is in reality plastic and constantly moving, but only at scales of barely-imaginable geological time. Rock is typically deemed hard, unyielding, unthinking, obstinate. Nevertheless, rock can fascinate and bewitch. We can be love-struck by a passion for collecting gemstones or blinded by gold fever. Landscapes are plundered, but mobile phones and the minerals they contain, connect us in intimate and global ways: what is this ambivalent condition of rock love?