The Natura Morte series of concrete works were developed out of an exploration of three sites on the Contaminated Sites register as per the Contaminated Sites Act (2003). The sites were the Helena River, proximate to the former Midland Railway Workshops, an industrial site in Bayswater with water table access to the Swan River, and a rail reserve in Bunbury, near the Koombana Bay mangroves. The three sites were all near water, all with a history of heavy metal and other contamination through former industrial processes and all with a degree of site remediation conducted.
I collected soils and waste from these sites, or the boundaries for one site that was fenced off, and created a series of small sculptures that act as portable landscapes. By using site specific soils to make cement, the physicality of a place is captured, along with all the toxins, fragments and organic matter that soil contains. Trucked-in soil often used as fill to remediate the site and the use of disposable drink and water containers as moulds, introduce a sense of dislocation and raises questions around permanence of place. Some surfaces of the sculptures are coated with metals such as lead, copper and aluminium, present as contaminants at the site. The sculptures both embody the site yet disrupt identification with place, and, along with the obvious materials failures, reveal an implicit and unsettling instability.
These works have been exhibited in various formats in exhibitions Ashfield Precinct Project through Another Project Space, 34th Sculpture Survey at Gombok Gallery and Fundamentally Unstable: 3 sites at Bunbury Regional Art Gallery, all in 2017. A related work, Stack, likewise made with site specific soils, won the South Perth Emerging Artist Award in 2016.
Stack | 2016 | concrete, site specific soil, steel brackets | 38 x 12 x 40 cm.
Natura Morte (selections 1 to 4) | 2016 – 2017 | concrete, site specific soil, copper, lead, aluminium, titanium paint | dimensions variable.