Wheatbelt Anticipatory Archive III
| Wheatbelt Anticipatory Archive III | 2023 | digital print on soil prepared paper | multiples |
| Artwork, image and photography © Perdita Phillips | to place | ||
| each print 28 x 41 cm | 6 unique state prints, edition 7/7 available | $330 each | |
| Digital inkjet print on Dryandra soil-prepared paper | |||
| Exhibition: Underfoot: sTrATa | 2023 | Gallery152, York | |
Wheatbelt anticipatory archive III is comprised of individual frames printed from a collection of aerial photos of individual houses in the Wheatbelt of Western Australia taken in the late 1950s/early 1960s. These are 6 (19826, 19821, 19706, 14801, 19721, 15032) of the 5000+ prints in the archive. Created by printing over stabilised soil coated paper, the nature of the process means that each print is unique.
The prints were loosely pinned to the wall and sighed gently when air flowed through open doors from the front to the back of the gallery. In some images, the Earth overwhelms the representations of home and the taming of the land. In others, it threatens to bring down lightning and dust storm onto the houses and lives contained in these triumphant yet mundane documents of settler colonialism. The work grapples with the difficulties of lived experience of settler privilege in an ever-present lithic world, alluding to land clearing and soil loss. They were shown as part of Underfoot: sTrATa, an exhibition of the underfoot collective (Annette Nykiel, Nien Schwarz and Perdita Phillips).