Stepping into the exhibition space of WA Artist, Perdita Phillips – one is immediately confronted by Maven (raven) a large banner artwork with an image of a woman and a child – dressed in the Edwardian fashion of the day.
The pose is formal and the brown tones sombre. She wears a hat with plumage. She holds a child dressed in what appears to be christening clothes, but the feathered hat overwhelms all: a fashionable Edwardian bird hybrid in black.
The sepia print is stark, but Phillips has strategically smeared blood-red soil across the face of the child and woman, as if wiping out their identities. Is it a cloud of their breath, or were they suffocated by the blood-red dust? This image sets the theme of Phillips’ Rock Love exhibition: about the need to reflect a deeper, sustained investigation into the underlying causes of the environmental crises that we are facing.
The exhibition space – Artgold in Burt Street, Boulder, Western Australia – is a 13-minute drive from the Super Pit, a gold mining operation approximately 3.5km long, 1.5km wide and 600m deep, and while the structure is big enough to be seen from space (which is quite an engineering feat) it must be said that the bright blue desert sky above the township is constantly stained with dust – from the Super Pit – that weeps earth-particles down on the town’s breathe-in breathe-out inhabitants.
Like the 1910 image of the woman and child, are the town’s inhabitants slowly being suffocated by blood-red dust The artist’s response to past and present landscapes of the Goldfields is like a breath of fresh air – an outsider creating awareness of the environmental impact of mining – as opposed to locals who live and work within the mining town’s environment, where industrial and mining technology suggest a capitalistic utopia of progress with machine-like perfection.
People are for the most part blissfully ignorant – ‘rock blindness’ and ‘plant blindness’ of past and current mining and mining-related desecrations of land and plant life. The artist states, “As a settler colonist, I try to negotiate (as best as I can) the destruction and disjunction that today’s Traditional Owners’ experience…”
Exhaustively referencing the past, Phillips’ Rock Love exhibition comes from a dystopian and far-from-perfect present/future where mining operations remain rigorous and intrusive, drawing attention to the environmental impact of mining through direct and indirect mining practices, by looking at what has been overlooked.
We see the geological maps and historical photos, but the artist says that the “most interesting things are what has been overlooked: what appears at the edges of photos or traces of dust and age, absences, and the discarded that surrounds us.”
After delving into the archives of the Museum of the Goldfields (the Dwyer and the Mackay Photographic Collection contains images dating back to the late 1800s documenting Kalgoorlie and Goldfields life), walking on Country, listening and responding the geological nature of the region, Phillips’ creation of mixed media prints, photographs, sculptural installations and short animations are a statement: “Landscapes are plundered, but mobile phones and the minerals they contain, connect us in intimate and global ways: what is this ambivalent condition of rock love?”
Perdita Phillips: Rock Love
Artgold, 14 Burt Street, Boulder (WA)
Exhibition: 16 – 29 November 2024
Perdita Phillips’ solo exhibition, Collected Habitats, will be presented at Ellenbrook Arts from 17 January – 28 February, as part of Fringe World 2025. For more information, visit: www.perditaphillips.com for details.
Image: Installation view of Rock Love by Perdita Phillips at Artgold (supplied)
Words: Debbie Carmody