Drought

POST OFFICE GALLERY
University of Ballarat
Tuesday 2 June – Saturday 27 June

BALLARAT MINING EXCHANGE
Wednesday 10 June – Friday 19 June

detail: Rail Cloth

video still

Participants:

Ania Walwicz
Colleen Morris
Jeanette Mc Whinney
Lauren Berkowitz
Tom Nicholson,Tony Birch

Graziella De Clario, Domenico De Clario
Susan Hawthorne   Suzanne Bellamy   Judith Rodriguez
Marisa Fazio, Vivie- Anne Fazzalori.

Dominique  Hecq, Catherine Clover

Lino  Concas , Tommaso  Durante

Elizabeth  Presa , Eduardo Cadava
Chris  Wallace-Crabbe, Kristin  Headlam    -
Kevin  Brophy, Deborah  Walker
Andrew  Lindsay, Anthony Pelchen

Tony Yap, Kavisha Mazzella.
Ruth Lyon, Janette  Hoe

Initiated by Lella Carridies, ‘Drought’ is an collaborative project between writers and artists.  The outcome of these collaborations is a series of artists’ books to be exhibited as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival.  The idea of the ‘book’ is broadly conceived to include not only traditional book forms with bound or concertinaed pages, but also soundscape, performance and installation.

‘Drought’ requires each participant to negotiate a translation between three distinct ‘languages’ drawn from a meteological or climatic phenomena, a visual or performative arts practice, and a written text in the form of poetry or prose.  This is a demanding challenge as each ‘language’ posses its own structure, grammar and lexicon – framed by its own discourses, judgments and values.   The task for the artists and writers is to find points of intersection where new interpretations and images can emerge.  Here we might think of the task of translation as being more a matter of interpretation and transformation than of finding exact equivalences.

At the outset the thematics of drought invites us to ‘read’ within a palimpsest of shifting tropes and images in the landscape.  As we do so, we see that this climatic condition is imbued with deep social, economic and political signification.  The American transcendental writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, believed that nothing exists in nature that is not a form of inscription bearing the marks and traces of history.  For Emerson, it becomes a matter of knowing how to read the languages and signatures of nature, and of finding in the “open book” that he calls nature, her incessant narrative.  “Nature is a mutable cloud,” he writes,  “which is always and never the same”.  Through its “endless combination and repetition of a very few laws”, it shapes and names the changing conditions of our historical existence.   Thus, for each of the artists and writers in this project the challenge is to identify and work with processes that reveal the shifting registers of drought in the landscape and beyond.  For some it is a matter of tracing the political and social history of a specific geographical site while for others is question of marking an interiority of thought.

Tom Nicholson and Tony Birch focus on the historical effects of drought upon the Yarra River, while Janette McWhinney develops a process for mapping the labyrinthine movements of the “lost soul in the desert”.  For Dominique Hecq drought is “first and foremost an event of the body” and resonant within her as she writes is Catherine Clover’s soundscape of the shrill song of a dying cicada recorded on a hot evening in suburban Sydney. Colleen Morris uses processes that give form to the degradation of the landscape and river systems.  Domenico de Clario’s ongoing fascination with his mother tongue – a unique dialect from Trieste – makes his collaboration with his own mother, Graziella, all the more poignant as she seeks to give form, through words, to “the lot of the migrant to withstand periods of ‘no spiritual water’”.

In her invitation to the artists and writers Carridies says, “ I am referring to psychological drought, spiritual drought, emotional   drought.  “DROUGHT” with a capital D, as a state of longing, absence, or exclusion”.  Though drought denotes lack and suffering, this project invites participants to redeem and transform through their work something of this loss and alienation.  ‘Drought’ reveals itself as a condition of possibility, whereby lack may become plenitude.