Rich, Dark Seams: Seven Forms (Collie ’22)
Exhibition Review by Duncan McKay.
Worldwide there have been many well-known instances where arts and cultural enterprises have made significant contributions to revitalising and reversing the declining fortunes of industrial centres. In Collie, in the South West of Western Australia, the Collie Art Gallery (opened 2015), the expansive Reflections mural by Guido Van Helten (completed in 2021) nearby on Wellington Dam, and the associated Collie Mural Trail suggest that art is being considered to have a part to play in a new phase of Collie’s history.
But what is art’s role and relationship to place in the context of a State Government scheme such as Collie’s Just Transition Plan (2020) and more broadly? It has been an important survival strategy for an arts sector reliant on public funding to emphasise the kinds of measurable outcomes that demonstrate that art is an integral and contributing part of a high-functioning, healthy and developing society. In a contemporary context, it is now commonplace to consider the paintbrush to be complicit with the new broom, instrumental in achieving objectives such as “diversifying the local economy”, “place activation”, and “place making”. So it is that Fleur Bainger’s article for the RAC on the Wellington Dam mural (2021) tells us the Kiosk at the Dam sold five burgers a day five years ago and in April 2021 was selling more than one hundred per day. When the article was written, the Kiosk’s owners were looking to expand their business from a 40 seat capacity to a 260 seat capacity – all thanks to the mural being “the hook to get you there.”
On my recent visit Collie, I drove past the turn-off to Wellington Dam and the mural, heading for the Collie Art Gallery and the Seven Forms (Collie ’22) exhibition, curated by Janice Baker. On this occasion, I didn’t see much evidence of the influx of burger-purchasing day-trippers drawn to Collie as cultural tourists. During the forty-five minutes I spent in the beautifully appointed gallery early on a Sunday afternoon, I was the only visitor who ventured far enough into the building to see the art on show. But, of course, great art experiences and successful works of art are not really to be registered by ticket sales and door-counters. Indeed, such measurements are usually made before any cultural experience has been had. Nevertheless, the art was the hook that got me to Collie - a place I have rarely visited previously.
One thing that all the artists in the Seven Forms show have in common is their use of materials and processes that have, in different ways, resonant parallels with industrial materials and processes. These are creative works that work with metals, with chemistry, with photographic technologies, with heat and with pressure. In many cases, they are materials and processes developed for manufacture and reproduction at scale – but have been used here in ways that subvert these kinds of ends.
Susanna Castleden presents a series of six monochromatic screen-prints, each of which contrasts a photographic image of a local bushland area with an overlaid map of property boundaries. While each scene shows few signs of human presence, these sites correspond to areas that have become key places around Collie for recreation and are being promoted as opportunities for tourism. Castleden tells us that the property boundaries are the dead tenements demarcating and controlling past mining operations at these sites. What is striking in these pieces is the tension that exists between the fine, geometric matrix of dead tenements and the apparent naturalism and life of the photographed landscapes. There is an order and hierarchy of values informing the apparently arbitrary parcelling up of this land. However, it is not an order or set of values that one can see or understand by looking at what is currently (or presumably was previously) on site. There is an interesting and haunting parallel in these images to the notion of Terra Nullius. The tenements are only conceivable in abstraction as the product of a primarily transactional and exploitative relationship with the land – dividing the spoils. Meanwhile, there is a whole other life that happens here in plain view and can reassert itself as imposed order and exhausted values recede in human memory.
Monika Lukowska’s works in Seven Forms focus our attention on coal as a precious substance, as the object of human endeavour, and as the warming but choking heart of many historic and contemporary communities worldwide. In her Vestiges series, we are drawn in to contemplate a dark presence at the heart of three portrait-format lithographs. I read these pieces as icons or objects of quasi-religious observance in a reliquary. In traditional Catholic or Orthodox icons, the divine properties of the subject are marked out by a gilt halo. But here, there is a sublime and wonderous power concentrated in the lumpen blackness of this material from which we receive the everyday miracles of heat and light. On a more abstract level, the incidence of coal in the earth is perhaps also referenced in these images of deep black forms contrasting with layered grounds in shades of grey. Coal is a geological concentration of carbon in the earth and black ink is likewise a concentrated application of carbon-based pigments. Lukowska’s digital print Open Cut offers a panoramic view of the coal mine – half in colour and half in black and white. Both halves of the image are superimposed upon or layered with gestural passages, abrasions and other marks that appear partially mirrored across the image. The piece sets up a delicate balance between the mine as a monument to human toil and collective determination and the mine as a site embodying ultimately self-destructive forces.
Melanie McKee’s digital photographs highlight most of all the scale of human impact on this land. In the piece Behold the hewn face of the quarry, whose vastness fills the frame of the image, has become a site of veneration – complete with an altar for burnt (BBQ) offerings. The images Spectre, and Trench, depict monstrous earthmoving machines rendered minuscule by the landscape of their own making. While Strike offers for contemplation a white cross on the tarmac, overlooking the descending terraces of the pit through a chain-link fence, which begs the question about what happened, or perhaps what will happen where X marks the spot. McKee’s other works combine imagery, text and material to draw attention to the range of ways that place can be represented. The two Immutable pieces are a conundrum, perhaps deliberately so. I read them as a comment on the inherent difficulty of reconciling all of the competing demands centred on Collie. There are long, impenetrable texts rendered in a phonetic translation that perhaps represent the apparent good intentions of government planning and strategy, and in each is the domineering image of an industrial scale excavation. The two atmospheric Pool pieces on suspended silk similarly contrast tabulated and graphic information about local sites with ethereal photographs of a place that is not entirely embodied in either mode of representation.
Alana McVeigh exhibits two trios of glazed, white ceramic vessels in Seven Forms, all loosely developed around a simple parabolic bowl form. The Coal Line series are articulated externally with linear black markings that summon up the subterranean seams of Coal that are so central to the story of Collie. The Black Diamond series are marked instead with teal lines that suggest contours on a topographical chart or perhaps the flowing lines of meteorological charts and reference the waters of the lake that this mine pit has become. The Coal Line vessels rise up around a deep internal receptacle, perhaps symbolising both the appetite for this resource and also the methods by which the demand is satisfied. By contrast, the Black Diamond vessels contain shallow depressions into and over which the external markings flow, suggesting a process of reintegration and reclamation brought about by natural systems. Formally, the two series set up an interesting dialogue between deep and static emptiness (capacity?) and shallow but dynamic fullness (energy?) which perhaps offer us ways of reflecting upon ecology, economy and community.
Layli Raksha’s Dreaming series includes two series of seven works on paper. One series features a photographic screen-print of scenes from along the Collie River viewed through a circular aperture, and the other series articulates the space around a circular absence using an even-handed application of coloured pencil. Both series are linked by their formal correspondence and the subtle spectrum of rainbow colours featured across the seven works in each series. I read the dreaming in the title of these works as a yearning or seeking, self-consciously contrasting with the deep knowing of the Traditional Owners of this place that the artist references in her artist statement. In the screen-printed works, we are challenged to see through and beneath the river, scenes to interpret signs of Country, which for many of us is obscured by the filter of “landscape”. In the coloured pencil works, the approach is more performative. The application of coloured pencil is like a ritual or an intonation on the fringes, looking from the outside to summon an image and understanding of Country that is as yet unseen. Both series seen together explore the limitations of looking and cultural understanding.
Sarah Robinson’s works in the exhibition establish a compelling dialogue between the physical presence of materials and the ephemeral nature of memory. Rather than exhibiting the reproducible impressions that are typically the end-product of the etching process, Robinson’s piece Ghost Energies presents three steel plates etched with photographic images of different apparatus associated with mining. It appears that apparatus depicted are protective and mechanical aids that relate to the mediation of the immaterial destructive forces of sound, light and the air, all of which pose a danger in the context of mining operations. But it is significant, perhaps, that the human presence is only implied in this impersonal imagery. The artefacts endure, but the individuals who operated and occupied them have left no trace. Robinson’s installation piece, Graphite Breath, also traces an historical trajectory. The left of the piece features reproductions of historical images documenting how Collie has been positioned locally and internationally by its resources and industry. The centre of the piece is occupied by small, etched steel plates, each articulating the form and texture of individual pollen spores, suspended in small groups at irregular intervals – like a scatter chart. These ancient miospores are found in Collie coal and released into the air as it burns. At the right of the installation is a breath drawing in graphite, with the inscription “pressure from the past became the future”. There is a story here about an evolution in the pressures themselves that create social, economic and environmental inertia and its opposite, the prospects for advancement into new futures.
Sue Starcken’s prints offer a complex and contemplative response to Collie and its natural environment. In the series A Continuum of Consequences, we are presented with three intricately detailed and layered crystalline structures formed by a systematic and symmetrical process of assembling a composite image from multiple impressions of multiple small plates. The resulting images are like the fleeting and fragmenting reflections in a kaleidoscope. On closer inspection, we see that the patterns are constructed from finely articulated botanical forms, including flowers and foliage, and forms that appear to be the branching networks of neurological or circulatory systems and skeletal forms. On one level, these images are the consequence of a laborious and meticulous process, each step of which has ultimately produced a unique and irreproducible image from materials and techniques that were designed to facilitate the faithful reproduction of images. On another level, they challenge us to unravel and disentangle the chain of social, economic and ecological events that make up the complex and fragile system of environmental co-dependencies that underpin the life of a place like Collie. The two prints on Belgian linen introduce heightened contrast and tonal three-dimensionality that give a static monumental presence in The Sly Dance of Adaptation I, and a dynamic and atmospheric impression in The Sly Dance of Adaptation II. I read these pieces as an exploration of the equilibrium between the imposition of human artifice and order and the residue and resistance of other forms and systems simultaneously at play.
In writing this essay and responding to these artworks after a brief encounter with them, I empathise with the seven artists whose work is featured in the Seven Forms exhibition. They have risen to the challenge of sensitively and creatively experiencing Collie as visitors. Responding to some of its sites and history in awareness of the changes still to come for this place and its community. The Seven Forms exhibition offers its audience something quite different to the monumentality and assertiveness of projects such as the murals which seek to make a “destination” of a place whose prospects, and those of its community, are no longer so clearly pre-destined by its natural resources. In my encounter with the diverse works in Seven Forms, one of the key things I noticed was a prevailing sense of apprehension, a sense in which the artists faithfully responded to the unresolved nature of what they had encountered. In these works, there is no attempt to provide a snap-shot or a sound-bite that claims to make Collie intelligible at a glance and that is a real strength of the Seven Forms exhibition and is a great credit to the efforts and vision of the artists, the curator, the Collie Art Gallery and those individuals and organisations who have supported it.
But what is art’s role and relationship to place in the context of a State Government scheme such as Collie’s Just Transition Plan (2020) and more broadly? It has been an important survival strategy for an arts sector reliant on public funding to emphasise the kinds of measurable outcomes that demonstrate that art is an integral and contributing part of a high-functioning, healthy and developing society. In a contemporary context, it is now commonplace to consider the paintbrush to be complicit with the new broom, instrumental in achieving objectives such as “diversifying the local economy”, “place activation”, and “place making”. So it is that Fleur Bainger’s article for the RAC on the Wellington Dam mural (2021) tells us the Kiosk at the Dam sold five burgers a day five years ago and in April 2021 was selling more than one hundred per day. When the article was written, the Kiosk’s owners were looking to expand their business from a 40 seat capacity to a 260 seat capacity – all thanks to the mural being “the hook to get you there.”
On my recent visit Collie, I drove past the turn-off to Wellington Dam and the mural, heading for the Collie Art Gallery and the Seven Forms (Collie ’22) exhibition, curated by Janice Baker. On this occasion, I didn’t see much evidence of the influx of burger-purchasing day-trippers drawn to Collie as cultural tourists. During the forty-five minutes I spent in the beautifully appointed gallery early on a Sunday afternoon, I was the only visitor who ventured far enough into the building to see the art on show. But, of course, great art experiences and successful works of art are not really to be registered by ticket sales and door-counters. Indeed, such measurements are usually made before any cultural experience has been had. Nevertheless, the art was the hook that got me to Collie - a place I have rarely visited previously.
One thing that all the artists in the Seven Forms show have in common is their use of materials and processes that have, in different ways, resonant parallels with industrial materials and processes. These are creative works that work with metals, with chemistry, with photographic technologies, with heat and with pressure. In many cases, they are materials and processes developed for manufacture and reproduction at scale – but have been used here in ways that subvert these kinds of ends.
Susanna Castleden presents a series of six monochromatic screen-prints, each of which contrasts a photographic image of a local bushland area with an overlaid map of property boundaries. While each scene shows few signs of human presence, these sites correspond to areas that have become key places around Collie for recreation and are being promoted as opportunities for tourism. Castleden tells us that the property boundaries are the dead tenements demarcating and controlling past mining operations at these sites. What is striking in these pieces is the tension that exists between the fine, geometric matrix of dead tenements and the apparent naturalism and life of the photographed landscapes. There is an order and hierarchy of values informing the apparently arbitrary parcelling up of this land. However, it is not an order or set of values that one can see or understand by looking at what is currently (or presumably was previously) on site. There is an interesting and haunting parallel in these images to the notion of Terra Nullius. The tenements are only conceivable in abstraction as the product of a primarily transactional and exploitative relationship with the land – dividing the spoils. Meanwhile, there is a whole other life that happens here in plain view and can reassert itself as imposed order and exhausted values recede in human memory.
Monika Lukowska’s works in Seven Forms focus our attention on coal as a precious substance, as the object of human endeavour, and as the warming but choking heart of many historic and contemporary communities worldwide. In her Vestiges series, we are drawn in to contemplate a dark presence at the heart of three portrait-format lithographs. I read these pieces as icons or objects of quasi-religious observance in a reliquary. In traditional Catholic or Orthodox icons, the divine properties of the subject are marked out by a gilt halo. But here, there is a sublime and wonderous power concentrated in the lumpen blackness of this material from which we receive the everyday miracles of heat and light. On a more abstract level, the incidence of coal in the earth is perhaps also referenced in these images of deep black forms contrasting with layered grounds in shades of grey. Coal is a geological concentration of carbon in the earth and black ink is likewise a concentrated application of carbon-based pigments. Lukowska’s digital print Open Cut offers a panoramic view of the coal mine – half in colour and half in black and white. Both halves of the image are superimposed upon or layered with gestural passages, abrasions and other marks that appear partially mirrored across the image. The piece sets up a delicate balance between the mine as a monument to human toil and collective determination and the mine as a site embodying ultimately self-destructive forces.
Melanie McKee’s digital photographs highlight most of all the scale of human impact on this land. In the piece Behold the hewn face of the quarry, whose vastness fills the frame of the image, has become a site of veneration – complete with an altar for burnt (BBQ) offerings. The images Spectre, and Trench, depict monstrous earthmoving machines rendered minuscule by the landscape of their own making. While Strike offers for contemplation a white cross on the tarmac, overlooking the descending terraces of the pit through a chain-link fence, which begs the question about what happened, or perhaps what will happen where X marks the spot. McKee’s other works combine imagery, text and material to draw attention to the range of ways that place can be represented. The two Immutable pieces are a conundrum, perhaps deliberately so. I read them as a comment on the inherent difficulty of reconciling all of the competing demands centred on Collie. There are long, impenetrable texts rendered in a phonetic translation that perhaps represent the apparent good intentions of government planning and strategy, and in each is the domineering image of an industrial scale excavation. The two atmospheric Pool pieces on suspended silk similarly contrast tabulated and graphic information about local sites with ethereal photographs of a place that is not entirely embodied in either mode of representation.
Alana McVeigh exhibits two trios of glazed, white ceramic vessels in Seven Forms, all loosely developed around a simple parabolic bowl form. The Coal Line series are articulated externally with linear black markings that summon up the subterranean seams of Coal that are so central to the story of Collie. The Black Diamond series are marked instead with teal lines that suggest contours on a topographical chart or perhaps the flowing lines of meteorological charts and reference the waters of the lake that this mine pit has become. The Coal Line vessels rise up around a deep internal receptacle, perhaps symbolising both the appetite for this resource and also the methods by which the demand is satisfied. By contrast, the Black Diamond vessels contain shallow depressions into and over which the external markings flow, suggesting a process of reintegration and reclamation brought about by natural systems. Formally, the two series set up an interesting dialogue between deep and static emptiness (capacity?) and shallow but dynamic fullness (energy?) which perhaps offer us ways of reflecting upon ecology, economy and community.
Layli Raksha’s Dreaming series includes two series of seven works on paper. One series features a photographic screen-print of scenes from along the Collie River viewed through a circular aperture, and the other series articulates the space around a circular absence using an even-handed application of coloured pencil. Both series are linked by their formal correspondence and the subtle spectrum of rainbow colours featured across the seven works in each series. I read the dreaming in the title of these works as a yearning or seeking, self-consciously contrasting with the deep knowing of the Traditional Owners of this place that the artist references in her artist statement. In the screen-printed works, we are challenged to see through and beneath the river, scenes to interpret signs of Country, which for many of us is obscured by the filter of “landscape”. In the coloured pencil works, the approach is more performative. The application of coloured pencil is like a ritual or an intonation on the fringes, looking from the outside to summon an image and understanding of Country that is as yet unseen. Both series seen together explore the limitations of looking and cultural understanding.
Sarah Robinson’s works in the exhibition establish a compelling dialogue between the physical presence of materials and the ephemeral nature of memory. Rather than exhibiting the reproducible impressions that are typically the end-product of the etching process, Robinson’s piece Ghost Energies presents three steel plates etched with photographic images of different apparatus associated with mining. It appears that apparatus depicted are protective and mechanical aids that relate to the mediation of the immaterial destructive forces of sound, light and the air, all of which pose a danger in the context of mining operations. But it is significant, perhaps, that the human presence is only implied in this impersonal imagery. The artefacts endure, but the individuals who operated and occupied them have left no trace. Robinson’s installation piece, Graphite Breath, also traces an historical trajectory. The left of the piece features reproductions of historical images documenting how Collie has been positioned locally and internationally by its resources and industry. The centre of the piece is occupied by small, etched steel plates, each articulating the form and texture of individual pollen spores, suspended in small groups at irregular intervals – like a scatter chart. These ancient miospores are found in Collie coal and released into the air as it burns. At the right of the installation is a breath drawing in graphite, with the inscription “pressure from the past became the future”. There is a story here about an evolution in the pressures themselves that create social, economic and environmental inertia and its opposite, the prospects for advancement into new futures.
Sue Starcken’s prints offer a complex and contemplative response to Collie and its natural environment. In the series A Continuum of Consequences, we are presented with three intricately detailed and layered crystalline structures formed by a systematic and symmetrical process of assembling a composite image from multiple impressions of multiple small plates. The resulting images are like the fleeting and fragmenting reflections in a kaleidoscope. On closer inspection, we see that the patterns are constructed from finely articulated botanical forms, including flowers and foliage, and forms that appear to be the branching networks of neurological or circulatory systems and skeletal forms. On one level, these images are the consequence of a laborious and meticulous process, each step of which has ultimately produced a unique and irreproducible image from materials and techniques that were designed to facilitate the faithful reproduction of images. On another level, they challenge us to unravel and disentangle the chain of social, economic and ecological events that make up the complex and fragile system of environmental co-dependencies that underpin the life of a place like Collie. The two prints on Belgian linen introduce heightened contrast and tonal three-dimensionality that give a static monumental presence in The Sly Dance of Adaptation I, and a dynamic and atmospheric impression in The Sly Dance of Adaptation II. I read these pieces as an exploration of the equilibrium between the imposition of human artifice and order and the residue and resistance of other forms and systems simultaneously at play.
In writing this essay and responding to these artworks after a brief encounter with them, I empathise with the seven artists whose work is featured in the Seven Forms exhibition. They have risen to the challenge of sensitively and creatively experiencing Collie as visitors. Responding to some of its sites and history in awareness of the changes still to come for this place and its community. The Seven Forms exhibition offers its audience something quite different to the monumentality and assertiveness of projects such as the murals which seek to make a “destination” of a place whose prospects, and those of its community, are no longer so clearly pre-destined by its natural resources. In my encounter with the diverse works in Seven Forms, one of the key things I noticed was a prevailing sense of apprehension, a sense in which the artists faithfully responded to the unresolved nature of what they had encountered. In these works, there is no attempt to provide a snap-shot or a sound-bite that claims to make Collie intelligible at a glance and that is a real strength of the Seven Forms exhibition and is a great credit to the efforts and vision of the artists, the curator, the Collie Art Gallery and those individuals and organisations who have supported it.
Seven Forms (Collie ’22)
Curatorial Essay by Janice Baker.
Collie is a town in the South West of Western Australia amongst forests and waterways. It is a region of great natural beauty, alongside an industrial base of coal mining and energy production. Collie’s railway, timber, coal, and electricity generation are inseparable from the industrial development of the state.The combination of industrial and physical landscapes is a focus of the Perth-based artists in Seven Forms.
Reflecting on visits to Collie and aware of the global shift away from fossil fuels, the artists echo relations between continuity and change in their art practice.Time was spent camping in forests, photographing and sketching by rivers and pools, and observing sites of mining and energy production. Research continued at the town’s museums, visitor centre and heritage places, as well as online, at the vintage second- hand shop, and at local pubs. Back in their studios, the artists focused on an aspect of Collie that affected them as poignant and relevant to explore further.
Across practices and media including ceramics, digital photography, drawing and printmaking, the artforms created for the exhibition highlight that human culture and the material realm are entangled.The new forms created for the exhibition acknowledge this, and offer us seven ways to see familiar landmarks and objects - Collie River and pools, the Quarry, mining tenements, a lump of coal, the region’s fauna, an open cut mine, and miner’s hat.
In her prints Melanie McKee pleats and folds detail from an 1899 map of Colliefields townsite to evoke place-making as a process, like printmaking. Named after the river, Collie was surveyed and gazetted in 1897. In McKee’s work, the trace of early town lots from the survey map gesture to the town’s future while also marking its past. Like other of her Collie images, her prints and textiles are informed by moving through Collie Shire as an artist and visitor. Born in Zimbabwe, and now living in Perth she is aware that multiple layers of seeing occupy a single site. Her work suggests that many perspectives, including those that are absent, comprise the visual perception of a place.
Two of McKee’s printed fabrics float lightly in the air. In one of these, Collie’s popular Honeymoon Pool is mirrored so its dark depth, drifting within the silk, is seen twice. Her photographs are reminiscent of a tourist gaze, keen to capture a familiar landmark but with elements awry; the BBQ site at The Quarry is transformed in her image by a man strangely posed as if at an altar beholding the imposing rock face.
Across the globe, new and future sources of energy are transforming relationships with place and community. Often, newly created sites overlay previous use and experiences of the land.Though we may not be able to ‘see’ a previous site, this does not mean it ceases to exist. Such is the case with mining tenements or leases marked for exploration in Collie through the WA Mining Act.The histories of such claims tell stories of the Collie coal basin.
There are hundreds of tenements in Collie Shire that are no longer ‘live’. In her prints, Susanna Castleden marks these ‘dead’ tenements as aerial lines across photographs she has taken of Black Diamond Lake, Bibbulmun Track and other sites now used for leisure by the local community and visitors. Castleden’s tenement lines are extracted from websites of mining leases.These mappings that once demarcated places for exploration are made tangible through the way she carefully formats them over places that have gained new meaning as leisure sites.
The lines that re-format once potential mining sites are markings of past endeavour and future hope. Images of places traced as tenements reflect moments of potential that exist as a meaningful way of encountering the landscape in the present. Castleden’s prints are a fascinating engagement with Collie’s past and present, inviting us to wonder at how surfaces are demarcated by the physical geography and geology of places yet are never really static and always in a process of transformation.
The porcelain vessels in the exhibition are Alana McVeigh’s thoughtful response to tailing dams in Collie that once stored mining byproducts and are converted into lakes.The transition from industrial infrastructure into leisure zones for locals and tourists to camp, swim and waterski is a remarkable shift. McVeigh tells of the dual use of the site through her double-walled vessels. The striking turquoise of the body of water, attributed to leaching from the site’s industrial past, and the white chalky banks of the lake are translated into clay to convey the site’s multiple usage.
Thrown on a wheel, McVeigh finely carves into the clay vessels and inlays coloured porcelain creating markings that tell of her encounter with the region’s watery places.These coal and water lines mark her forms as the complex meaning- making of place and offer a counter view to the other side of the story, which has to do with the surface pleasure to be found in the tranquil beauty of the lakes in their forest setting. The duality discerned in McVeigh’s ceramic forms, reflects the multiple historical meaning present in the works created for Seven Forms.There is more beneath the surface than meets the eye, the works suggest.
Layli Rakhsha presents glimpses of Collie River in her series of silk prints.The river is 154 km long and Rakhsha is aware of its winding length and nuanced meanings.This is Noongar Country, and for the Wiilman people, the river and its tributaries are the creation of ancestors.The serpent-like creature who made the Rivers and environs is a powerful presence to acknowledge while walking alongside the River and water sites. Rakhsha’s prints glimpse river sites through a circle so it seems we observe a section of river through an antique pinhole camera. The works have the feel of a sepia print, they suggest an older time at the beginning of photography.They feel analogous to how culture organises what we see, like a dream world through a camera lens. Respectful of being on Aboriginal Country, as a migrant who remains connected to her Iranian heritage, these river formations connect Rakhsha to the land, and to sites that are absent yet present as material forms.
In the end, her series of prints seem to say that image-making is an illusionary representation of a world, seen through a particular perspective. This is what art shows us, that our own view is only one way of making sense of a place. For Rakshsha, empty circles are filled with the possibility of change whereas the realistic depictions of Collie River’s pools and riverside flora represent an historical moment fixed in the past. The relationship to Aboriginal Country and ancestry, and the region’s industrial presence as coal country gives Collie a unique significance for the artists in this exhibition.
For Monika Lukowska, who was raised in the Polish city of Katowice in the heart of Upper Silesian coalfields, vivid recollections of coal skies inform her impression of Collie. There is much unsettlement around coal as a fossil fuel, but in her home town coal carries prestige at the regional and personal level. European towns and villages are experiencing social and economic change as sustainable energy sources come to market but this does not remove important cross-generational relations with mining and community. Like Collie, these changes are shifting the way communities engage with jobs, family, and institutions.
Sketched by Lukowska with pieces of coal brought from Poland and printed onto paper, her large landscape image observes how the atmospheres of two open mine sites differ, yet are similar in their vast size and impact. If we look closely, we can see that the image has been drawn in coal. In addition to the landscape, are three images of coal.These objects seem to float in the air, or hurtle like meteorites. And indeed, all life is carbon and comes from stars. The focus of our attention in these pictures shifts to the form of coal, its shape and mass. Across Lukowska’s works in the exhibition we are given an affecting linkage with the ancient fossil, and its global reach, as a presence that will remain long after our species is extinct.
Sparked by interest in the objects of mining and being underground - such as her father’s carbide caving lamp and its enhancement of sight - Sarah Robinson brings to her art practice a fascination with insights arising from our peripheral vision. Things at the edges of our perception. Moving to Western Australia from Somerset in the UK, where coal was mined by communities from the fifteenth century to the 1970s, similar lamps were used to see in the dark.The objects she incorporates in Seven Forms, engage with transition, the feeling that exists between light and dark, the liminal spaces where shadows suggest that things are never quite what they seem. Perhaps this relates to the lamp itself, for when introduced miners could certainly go deeper and farther but this led to accidents that the safety lamp was intended to prevent.
Coal is a remarkable source of energy; providing the world with light for generations.What does it mean for objects to become obsolete, like miners’ lamps and the home-made miner’s hat and communication system Robinson observed in the Collie Museum and second-hand shop? Can these artefacts bring alive the recent past and the experiences of mining communities as countries seek other forms of energy? Her three steel etching plates in the exhibition carry the ghost of the past in their markings and materiality. This form of ghostly imagery has been a part of her work for some time, as she finds ways to translate how matter such as coal dust and carbon re-forms in our bodies making us an extension of everything that has come before us.
Sue Starcken works with etching plates too, the prints produced from her plates mark the skull bones of small animals and carry her felt response to the hybrid critters of the Collie region. Creating individual images on copper plates she transforms these into larger works printed on Belgium linen. Starcken is keenly interested in the resilience of animals and fauna in the region and that they can overrun the environment given the opportunity. Deeply concerned about the environment and working to prevent land development around her own home and studio, Starcken views the materiality of her etched and printed images as themselves an entangled form of nature-culture. Her work tells us that any natural form is part of many processes and cannot be pinned down to one thing nor the other.
Starcken finds poignant connections with change as a transference echoed in the fauna of the Collie region. Native and introduced species make up the landscape of the region, which like other places has been transformed by human culture. In her works Starcken marks the hybridising of places and people.While transformation is also underway and part of life, we can inform change by careful reflection and a deeper engagement with the impact of processes of change.
Sometimes it seems that more can be understood about how we experience a place from in-between spaces and peripheral edges, than can be found in the stark light of day. An exhibition explores ideas about how to create meaning through positioning a set of images and objects to draw visitors into particular conversations.The seven artists layer and merge ways of imagining Collie as an affecting relation between the human and physical realms.
They do this to enable, perhaps, a cultural re-imagining that heeds the environment and community as contiguous and connected.As visitors and practicing artists they open sites, places and views to new ways of seeing. Presented together in the splendid Collie Art Gallery, Seven Forms (Collie ’22) offers the reality that there are various layers of observing a town and its environs. Given the unsettled state of the world, the capacity to imagine multiple perspectives acknowledges that a future is what we make in the present, and in this there is hope in change and transition.
