UNRAVELLING COUNTRY

8 – 26 February 2006

Unravelling Country unfurls from the threads of intersecting lives - threads intricately embedded in South Coastal ground.

The artwork fruits from the cumulative humus of sense made joyous and melancholy in the presence of memory.

Reflecting sensitivities gained through lives of leaving and returning, of growing up and bringing up, of growing away and being brought back home.

Four artists explore their experience of being in relation to place. Drawing on a connection to particular sites, acquired over time and by taking delight in the details of their surroundings, their works make a gesture towards a larger understanding of the interdependence of the human and natural world.

HOLLY STORY

Holly Story's work investigates ideas of place and identity, drawing on her own experience of migration to Australia from England in 1971. She has an interest in the implications of different forms of representation of the natural world, including photography, botanical art and designs for embroidery, and often combines them to unsettle pre-conceptions about hierarchies of knowledge.

The use of cloth and references to the traditions of textiles in her work continues to provide a metaphor for human presence in the landscape.

Her works begin with simple domestic objects and materials from “her” site around the Deep River. They honour the skills of the hand and traditions of making and making do. In art history terms she see them as landscapes; pared down, arranged and interpreting the elements of a place, combining its natural and cultural history.

KATE CAMPBELL-POPE

Kate has created a series of small Homecoming drawings to illustrate her initial responses to returning to the Albany area after a period of time away.

A landscape so familiar, being that of her upbringing, yet having the feeling of needing to be re-introduced. Daily walks are spent with a keen eye on plants, stones, shells, creature tracks.

These have been recorded, as one might record a new friend's phone number or address.

The drawings are layered on top of watercolour images derived from the landscape of the internal body.

Kate's fascination is for the resonances between the micro and macroscopic worlds, each being a reflection of the other. A desire for the human animal to see beyond itself, into endlessly larger and smaller worlds.

KATI THAMO

Kati is a visual artist who works predominantly as a printmaker, with her art being a form of storytelling.

Kati has created a series of prints exploring how the ‘felt' experience of a place imprints on the mind, inscribing a tracery of remembered sensory experiences.

Some of the works are like dreamscapes, with fragments of memory floating across the land, interwoven with the forest. Other works describe the immediacy of visual experience – the sight of the ground underfoot, the profusion of foliage, or the forest canopy overhead, where small details are caught and magnified.

In her own words Kati writes of her works in the show:

"Describing a place of dreams … with fragments of confused memory floating up and past. Imprints on the mind inscribed across the land and interwoven with the tracery of forest foliage … absorbing and transforming experiences of place, experiences of body."

RAKU PITT

Raku's primary discipline is the land around him. Using whatever materials and sounds are at hand, he creates sensitive responses to the chaotic wildness he seeks out, and finds engrained within his skins, dreams and memories.

Raku is also convenor of Stories From The Ground, an illustrated storytelling collective, and is preparing to embark on The Pedal-Organ Voyages later in the year ... an epic transcontinental bicycle journey towing a miniature traveling organ in a little sailing boat.

The Dog Shadows series is frotted from the aging surfaces of Raku's childhood house, all within the silhouettes of imaginary ‘wild dogs'. They act to bridge the specificities of the Suit and the ambiguities of imagination and memory explored in the Letters.

Mapping physical aspects of personal history – an old rust-pitted Metters stove-top, or the cracked and worn surface of the kitchen floor – the Dogs are simultaneously records of return, which can be indexed to particular moments of intimate engagement with the textural 'fabric' of the decrepit dwelling.

Unravelling Country is a Perth International Arts Festival (PIAF) event, in which the overarching theme this year is Earthly Pleasures ... the Great Southern region, specifically Albany, is the major focus for regional programs in 2006.

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