Welcome Fire (Bush Retreat) is the outcome of nine months spent visiting the family block of land in the Otways, in Victoria’s South-West. Named ‘the Dairy’ for the hundred years the block served as a milking dairy, a part of the land was adapted into a ‘rustic retreat’ after my parents purchased the dairy in the early 80s. Much of the land, left as bush now creeps into the paddocks. Eucalypts fringe the fences, blackwoods and tea tree spot paddocks thick with bracken – nature’s first responders.
Welcome Fire (Bush Retreat) collages family and stolen histories, endurance and iterative performance, pastoral and survivalist techniques, cataloguing and observation. Admitting my own impulse to ‘know’ or ‘understand’ the secrets of the land, I opted for empirical modes of capturing: photography, collecting, recording.
This exhibition is an attempt to describe place, space, time and identity, only to be undone by Everything I do not know and cannot measure or describe. Like a eucalypt leaf barely leaves a shadow, the most poetic, awful and moving aspects of this project no longer exist. In hope, or desperation, I have collected what I can.
To view the room sheet click here.