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Seven Forms draws together seven artists whose work explores concepts of place. Seven Forms (Collie '22) was exhibited at Collie Art Gallery in 2022, and Seven Forms (Geraldton '26) is showing at Geraldton Regional Art Gallery 17 April to 21 June 2026.
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(Geraldton '26)
Susanna Castleden
Created on site at a wind farm near Geraldton, this artwork was made in and with the environment. The position of the 54 turbines along the coastal ridge orients the turbine blades to capture the power of the prevailing winds. By extension, that same wind energy impacted on the laboriously prepared sheet of paper, bruising, creasing, and shaping its surface.
Made on site over two days, the piece uses a dark gesso background so the turbine blade appears to emerge from a turbulent sky. The tip of one of the turbine’s three blades is printed 14 times, echoing the steady rhythm of the blade’s 14.4 revolutions per minute. A second, more irregular layer interrupts this sequence. In extreme winds, turbines feather their blades and slow to prevent damage, and I was interested in trying to capture this subtle flexing of time, force, and movement.
Wind turbine sites are usually only experienced from a distance and the wind turbines themselves are at a scale that is almost beyond comprehension. The reference to time and scale in the artwork title 1:1 Wind Turbine Blade (14 RPM) brings both an architectural and mapping perspective to the work, to emphasise our human relationship to the object.
In this artwork I wanted to engage with the scale and motion of the wind turbine - as well as their location in one of Australia’s windiest regions - to understand, and consequentially visually relay, the physical and atmospheric registers of this immense energy source.
Monika Lukowska-Appel
Coastal erosion is an increasingly urgent issue in Greater Geraldton. The long-term environmental pressures continually reshape the shoreline, and the coast remains a site where natural processes and human interventions collide. Reflection on these shifting environmental conditions and their impact on the town forms the conceptual foundation of the Speculative Ecologies body of work.
Drawing on Dunne and Raby’s notion of speculative design, the series explores possible worlds emerging from the ongoing transformation of the Geraldton coastline driven by human-induced environmental change. Rather than predicting specific ecological outcomes, the work invites viewers to imagine alternative, evolving ecologies that are uncertain, ambiguous, and entangled with more-than-human forces.
In my process, I start with collecting small fragments from the shoreline, including shells, stones, seaweed, and organic debris. Each fragment is photographed and processed through the Polycam app, which utilises generative AI to generate three-dimensional forms. In this context, AI functions as a tool rather than an interpretive agent, with the sole prompt being the production of a 3D model. The resulting ambiguous forms blur the boundary between the real and the imagined, revealing how digital technologies can extend or distort perceptions of the natural world. These AI-generated forms are then translated through traditional printmaking processes and 3D printing, grounding speculative imagery in tactile, material practice.
Melanie McKee
This body of work uses three photography-based processes to investigate a 2km stretch of trails following the Chapman River and Estuary before ending at the river mouth and Indian Ocean. It reflects my embodied experience of place and imagines the forces that local governments seek to assess, mitigate and manage in the face of the Climate Crisis. Encircled by municipal sporting grounds, roads and suburban development, this wild site is overlaid by manmade structures and systems of ordering—building, naming, mapping.
The artists walked this site collectively during a residency in 2025, and within a month it was burned away.
The photographs are grounded in time and space, eliciting a cadence through intimate scale and format, paused by flashes of pink, a memory of the different, otherworldly landscape of the Hutt Lagoon pink lake near Port Gregory experienced the day before. This temporal slippage recurs throughout my practice.
The photographic screenprints shift the focus to light and shade, texture and line and reflect the changing nature of the landscape and environment affected by climate (dry and hot) and (un)anticipated human intervention (arson).
Finally, a series of cyanotypes expresses the modulation of the river as experienced walking beside it and through it. Blue is synonymous with the Mid West, referencing wide skies and vast ocean vistas. The reflected, soft-focus cyanotypes imagine what it is to be immersed (inundated) by the waters of the region. Where everything becomes blurred and sound roars and is muffled at the same time.
Alana McVeigh
Wanderings in and around locales of the Mid West of Western Australia sparked artist Alana McVeigh’s interest in the synthesis of colour, textures and markings emanating between the sky, ocean and land. Key to her inspiration is the striking colour transition that occurs between earth’s rich red ochres and organic rock markings and patterns. The hues of the ocean also provide stimulus for her current body of work. Gathering organic samples from Geraldton, Northampton, Hutt River and outlying localities, McVeigh shapes, carves and pierces wheel-thrown porcelain forms to reflect glimpses of these unique regions while being firmly grounded in the materiality of place – the greater Mid West.
Layli Rakhsha
A visit to Geraldton and the Chapman River in 2024 awakened something within me. That experience ignited a desire to return to the landscape, to spend time listening, observing, and responding.
In this exhibition, each piece represents a convergence of perception and emotion—a translation of the landscape into a personal mythology. Through the mediums of pinhole photography and drawing, I seek to capture moments of silence and resonance that hold deep personal significance. By weaving these practices together, I aim to evoke reflection and longing, inviting viewers to contemplate the places that resonate within their own stories.
I strive to witness the immensity of the landscape through a tiny aperture, deliberately setting aside technical aspects of photography. My aim is to capture what I perceive directly through this small opening, rendered in black and white, to record the enigmatic qualities of places such as Ellendale Pool and Chapman River.
Each work becomes a dialogue with the spaces I briefly inhabit—a lasting image that bears silent witness to the transient encounters between self and place. I find meaning in the contrast between experiencing vastness and observing it through a narrow lens. These impressions are further explored and extended in my drawings.
Sarah Robinson
It is well known that boat owners hate barnacles. These creatures settle on hard surfaces by standing on their heads and secreting a fast-setting cement to ensure they stay permanently fixed for a lifetime. The work ‘Sessile Interventions’ flips the biological life cycle narrative of acorn barnacles. I found these specimens attached to plastic washed up on the south bank of the Chapman River beside the Indian Ocean, at North Bluff Point in Geraldton. They form clusters of calcareous 3D structures with flat bases enabling them to exploit multiple habitats. The creatures mimic capitalist strategies with individual feeding nets of twenty-four pairs of legs acting as ‘filtering’ antennae.
Barnacles are marine creatures that disperse widely in imagined patterns of travel that resonate with patterns of data intercepted from satellites at Geradton’s ‘Spy Base’, with its striking radome structures. The barnacle cluster became an ‘object’ to explore through drawing, 3D printing and GenAI, while reflecting on artificial intelligence and its rapid integration into our lives, invited or not. I am interested in questioning the true meaning of human creativity as the network of digital data, information, and interception continue to expand.
Sue Starcken
Razor honed. Stealthy. Fierce. Pervasive and covert, the near ubiquitous Double Gee inadvertently behaves as a botanical gate crasher. In grim, spiralling swathes, and ostensibly with the best of intentions, this hardy plant has traversed the globe as a covert passenger and volitional transplant of species. But the Double Gee articulates a considered paradox. Deemed appropriate as a potentially productive food crop, early farming practises quickly unfettered a veritable beast. The plant soon betrayed an unstoppable rampant habit and extended its realm well beyond the domestic.
The connection between humans and our encompassing environment is an on-going enigma. Historically, ecological intrusions into the Australian landscape have been pervasive and keenly focussed on the overhaul and modification of the land. The domestication of flora and fauna in new environments brings with it an arsenal of known and unknown consequences. Degradation of soils and the loss of biodiversity have been side events to the larger projects of technological development and economic requisites.
So indelibly entwined is our reliance on the land and its development that it becomes incumbent upon us to champion its protection. With a focus on selected species that are endemic to the Geraldton area, this study will investigate the sheer magnitude of change to vegetation and biodiversity and their long-term retrieval and resurrection.
(Collie '22)
Susanna Castleden
Cruise ships, caravans and airplanes have, for me, been signifiers of the mobile world of leisure travel.As a global pandemic unfolded in early 2020, the acuteness of immobility has been brought into view for many, and my previous works in airplane boneyards and cruise ship terminals now enfold with visions of grounded airplanes and retired cruise ships lined up in scrapping docks. This recent contraction in the scale of global mobility has prompted new perspectives and approaches in my practice, ones that sharpen my inquisitiveness towards new ways of encountering and representing place. The series of works in Seven Forms comes from this inquisitiveness. The images in this series are of sites around Collie that are now associated with leisure activities - swimming, walking, hiking and camping - but were once part of mining operations. Over each of these images an aerial map of the dead mining tenements associated with each place has been printed, creating a geometric delineation over the landscape. In these works, there is a tension between the image of the place as experienced as a site of leisure, and the demarcation of the same place by the speculative value of what is, or was, below the ground.
Monika Lukowska-Appel
Growing up in the mining town, Katowice, located in Southern Poland, coal and mines have always been an inextricable part of my life. I have seen its effect on the environment resulting in constant smog enveloping the city, thick residue of soot on the buildings and smoking heap stacks in the suburbs. At the same time coal has been a part of the cultural identity of the region, something to be proud of, a catalyst for economic growth and a source of income for generations of miners. However, with current climate change and the inevitable transition from fossil fuels, towns like Collie and my hometown need to rediscover themselves anew. It is not only the economic aspect but also years of heritage.What lies ahead and how can identity be reconstructed amidst the changes? The work presented in the exhibition aims to embody my visceral reaction to the coal pit in Collie. I intend to record not only the visual aspects embedded within the landscape, the layers of history, geology and environmental changes. My photographs of the pit are combined with drawings, drypoints, and etchings which were created to record the textures and materiality of the place. I am interested in complexities that coal and coal mining encompass and to gradually unravel them through my art practice and research.
Melanie McKee
Since the discovery of coal in 1893, Collie has been vital to Western Australia’s economy and energy sector, supplying most of the coal for the region. However, Australia joins other nations in the inevitable shift away from fossil fuels to more sustainable means of energy production with implications for resource towns like Collie, which are required to transition to diversified economies that are not yet clearly defined. Yet the landscape has much to offer beyond resources, and an area highlighted for economic growth moving forward is that of eco-tourism. I seek to engage through creative practice with the landscapes of Collie and acknowledge my role as a tourist gleaning an experience of a place that is new to me, but full of varied histories and uses of industrial, personal, and cultural significance. Artists have the capacity to transcend a singular view of place, instead perceiving places “in ways which suggest temporal and perspectival depth” (Modeen, 2010). As a printmaker and textile artist, I am interested in the way that varied perceptions of Collie can be imbued into the surface of a print through printmaking processes and through manual acts of folding, stitching, and pleating printed surfaces.
Alana McVeigh
Examining simplicity of form, purity and translucency through the medium of porcelain, Western Australian artist Alana McVeigh aspires to capture and convey atmospheric light, hues, textures and markings reflecting site-specific locations. In referencing the unique light of Western Australia, McVeigh uses the pure white clay to absorb light while at the same time reference the stark, bleaching Australian summer daylight. McVeigh brings the qualities of light, hues and textures evident of the Collie region to the series of vessels presented in the Seven Forms exhibition by responding to the repurposing of derelict mines - Black Diamond and Lake Kepwari. The swimming holes offer this region a nucleus for leisure, recreation and water sports while retaining the region’s mining history. Importantly, replantation of over 60 varieties of local native flora frame Lake Kepwari, a site that is a component of the Collie River’s Waugal Aboriginal Heritage. The wheel-thrown double-walled vessels are inlayed with stained porcelain inspired by the glistening, reflected light of the water holes. The gloss glazes are juxtaposed with the visible remnants left behind by the mining process - textures, markings and scarring evident of an important past history.
Layli Rakhsha
Collie River has significant cultural value for the Noongar people. Their strong connection to the water has mythological and spiritual aspects. The contemporary custodian of the Collie River mythology, Joe Northover, speaks of the hairy-faced rainbow serpent from the north of Collie, passed through the Collie area and moved towards Eaton, forming the Collie River. Some stakeholders also described a spiritual connection to the Collie River based on the mythological values of the river. Each time they visit the river, they toss in a small handful of dirt to let the rainbow serpent know they are present. Early this year, while I was visiting Black Diamond Lake and Minninup Pool in Collie, I kept thinking of how I could converse with the place, what is beneath and protected the water and what I could toss to the river to perhaps say, I was here. In my works for Seven Forms, I use the Collie River as a metaphor to reflect my story, the idea of encounter, dialogue, and communication. The works in Seven Forms explore my approach to the river and interpretation of inspiration and ambition and how our communications and connections can shape our present and desire for the future. With my study on the history of the Collie River and visual research, I intend to embed my story in the water metaphorically.
Sarah Robinson
A geological lens draws on my childhood experiences living on the Mendip Hills in England, keeping warm beside a home coal fire and not realising the implications of the miners’ strikes of the 1970s as a teenager. Collie’s mining landscape is in a moment of transition. I excavated the town’s history, starting in the State Library of Western Australia, to view digitally archived photographs of the Collie Power Station in 1939. These dark images revealed Collie’s industrial infrastructure appearing as eerie sites, frozen in time and place.The copies of ghost negatives on glass reminded me of photographs of a sub-arctic Soviet coal mine, Pyramiden, and its abandoned community infrastructure that almost became a post-human environment. In producing my artwork for Seven Forms, etching steel is a catalyst amid the technological energies discovered through objects that protected a miner’s body. Arriving at this point, I moved towards a new space shaped by graphite, a critical mineral that holds great potential and brings positive change to Collie’s transition as a past becomes the future.
Sue Starcken
My interest in the medium and philosophy of etching is based in an attribute that simultaneously broaches both the historic and the contemporary. Invariably unique state, the mixed media facets of the work trace an assemblage of shards and fragments. Any expectation of reproducibility often associated with printmaking, however, is defied by a complex schematic that engages the shifting dialogue between spontaneous and planned characteristics. Heavily layered through the application of multiple plates and techniques, these works ‘map’ the fluid development of symbolic language and the creation of a ‘made up’, hybridised world. The series of works made for the Seven Forms exhibition draw on the binary nature of examining landscape and its flora and fauna. Colonial settlement has clearly and irrevocably altered the land that was/is home to droves of native species with the adaptation of introduced species to this land being swift and emphatic. Masquerading as ‘truth’, history posits a partial view of the trajectory of changes to the environment to suit cultural and economic imperatives. These works intend to encapsulate the sheer magnitude of change to the land and traverse the distinct realms of imaginary counterpoints to ‘natural’ history.