A collaborative project with Isis St Pierre, commissioned for the Re-order exhibition, Spring Bay Mill, Ten Days on the Island, 2015.
Artist Statement:
This place. The site of diligent work for a breath in time, sits silently inhaling, waiting; a raw yet beautiful relic of industry; a blight on a landscape so awe inspiring when viewed in return.
We are privileged to be here, visitors with a free pass to explore this site of cultural significance to our home state, as it sits at the tipping point of change from what is known into the uncertainty of potential. We are struck by the contrasts of scale. The mammoth machinery dominates but the traces of individual human endeavor keep emerging. As we become more aware of the lives that have been here before us we are reminded of those that have been changed, the uncertainty that still exists for many, the potential of which they are being asked to believe. They are still represented here in the hand written dockets, typewritten reports, dirty, dog-eared machinery manuals, and well-worn maps. We are struck by the irony that paper; the end product of the resource processed here, remains and stands strongly in evidence.
We have chosen to gather and use these documents to construct an immersive installation in a machinery shed, bringing softness to the harshness of the site, exploiting transparency, welcoming the influence of whatever weather may seep through the cracks. We have disordered, fragmented, stitched and reordered these documents into floating planes representing the altering of landscape, the potential that is presented by change, and those things that are beyond our control. As we visit this place, assemble the work, watch it breathe within its isolated pod, we are ever conscious of the people.
