2021 Geelong Acquisitive Print Award
The Dead Tenements series comes from my ongoing interest in finding ways to visualize how we come to know and experience the world. The images in this series are of remote places in Western Australia, mostly in the Kimberley, Pilbara and Gascoyne, that I have visited over the past few years. Some are tourist destinations, some are the parts in between, some are stopovers, and others are of places that form a mining community. Over each of these images I have layered an aerial map of the dead mining tenements that are associated with each particular place. Beneath the image is a layer of gesso, and a layer of graphite, both of which contain mined minerals, which have then been revealed by a series of small excavation marks on the surface of the print. In these works, I was interested to see the visual relationship between the image of the place as experienced on the ground, and the delineation of the same place by the value of what is, or was, below the ground.