Checking in on Charged Landscape
When I first met with Jon Dixon and Great South Coast Leadership Group representative and local arts advocate extraordinaire Gareth Colliton on the Port Fairy site we were greeted with lightning flashes and thunder claps. It seemed an auspicious welcoming. The night before we unveiled our completed work in March 2016 thunder again crackled through the sky. This time it was louder and the charged air felt alive. Not only alive but continuous with the life force in my own body as well as the creative life force which had guided our whole project. In the speech I prepared for our opening I decided to be courageous and share this sense of the living landscape with the audience. It was an important turning point within my practice which enabled something to gel.
The earth is alive.
And as Professor Tom Griffiths from the ANU Centre of Environmental History points out in his 2018 Australian Museum address, it has only been in the last 300 or so years that we have forgotten this.
CHARGED LANDSCAPE awakens in the evening sky. I have had the pleasure of guiding Grade Two School children on a night time exploration of the space as well as making numerous trips just for fun. On clear summer and autumn nights you can find the Dark Emu in the Sky looking over the Dark Emu imprinted in the ancient stone.
The Great South Coast Leadership Group enabled this amazing project to happen. Check out their site for more about the project and scroll down to the 2016 section of their photo gallery to see more images of the opening night.
Standard Newspaper coverage of the opening
If you want to find our more about Indigenous Australian Astronomy the following links are a good place to start:
The Crossroads: Aboriginal Knowledge & Modern Science
Charged Landscape
Sculpt Ed public art commission and collaboration with artist Jon Dixon
Late last year an EOI was put out by the Great South Leadership Group for a public sculpture that would be installaed on the Port Fairy Rail Trail. This was the second iteration of a program that saw Adnate’s Ngatanwarr Mural installed in Warrnambool last year. http://www.warrnamboolstreetart.com/ngatanwarr-welcome-mural
Jon and I were among eight artists who submitted individual responses to the brief. After an interview process the panel were unable to chose between Jon and I, both of us being seen to offer particular unique strengths to the project. It was for this reason that we were invited to collaborate on the project, and invitation that we both readily accepted.
We were both vaguely familiar to each other, having met about 15 years ago when I ran a small studio gallery with fellow artist Beth Garden in the old Fletcher Jones Factory. Since that time Jon’s sculpture career has gone from strength to strength, as has his brilliant Lyons Sculpture Park, in South West Victoria. It’s worth the drive, check it out:
http://www.lyonssculpturepark.com/
Work began in late January with an insanely tight deadline of March 11. The project was a great experience, we both approached it with the kind of openness, flexibility and creativity that I have come to really enjoy in collaborations.
Jon came across a very cool material called Strotium. Not the scary kind that is found in collapsed nuclear reactors but a benign form that operates as a brilliant “glow-in-the-dark” medium. It doesn’t matter how old you are, we don’t think anyway, there is something so magic and a purely exciting about things that glow in the dark that we thought this was the perfect medium to combine in our resin based “stars”.
Below is the statement that accompanies Charged Landscape. If you happen to visit Port Fairy take a stroll down the rail trail, leaving from Regent Street, and go & find this work for yourself.
This work invites you to activate it. As day becomes night enter the salt marsh trail with your torch in hand, wander forward until you find the eleven ancient rocks embedded with glowing blue stars, once here take your torch and charge the stars until they glow even more brightly still, watch the stars move, hide and unfold as you move your body around this space.
The Charged Landscape
This work has borrowed its landscape in innumerable ways. As collaborating artists our early conversations discussed how the multiple experiences and histories of this single place might be drawn out and articulated. We considered different materials in concert with developing a form that could describe the macro and micro dimensions of this space, stars and fossils emerged as a means to encapsulate this.
The Emu in the Sky
The Aboriginal star constellation the Emu in the Sky quickly became a conceptual and literal image to work within. Unlike most constellations it is comprised of the dark patches where thick clouds of interstellar dust obscure light from the galaxy’s center. This recognition of negative space as well as the sense that some aspects of the world remain hidden from vision provided a poetic lead for this creative process.
The Emu’s head rests next to the Southern Cross, its body stretches across the sky through Scorpio and out past Sagittarius. It is most visible on autumn nights. The Emu in the Sky is common to many First Nations people across Australia from Papunya in the NT to the Kamilaroi and Euahlayi in NSW and Qld to the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park where the Guringai carved the grand Emu into a cliff top. Closer to home in the Grampians the Gariwerd creation story describes the Emu as the ferocious Tchingle. Locally, the Gundjitmarra also hold the Emu with reverence, unable to step backwards he embodies the power to move forward with strength.
For both artists the Emu in the Sky in the sky reminds us of our place within the cosmos, in the much, much larger time and space in which we all so briefly exist. It allows us to acknowledge and celebrate the eon’s long interconnection of indigenous Australian’s and their country and symbolizes the strong bright future that we must work together to create.
Fossils
Charged Landscape is a transitory space that mirrors the multi-dimensions that exist within it. In this mini stellar nursery we have fashioned a series of stars each of which contains a fossil record of the different histories that intersect across this plane.
Research through the themes of ecology, geology, indigenous history, colonial and contemporary history as well as the railway line itself determined which fossils we would encode.
Although it would take a small book to record all of the information collected through this research, we offer a few starting points which may inspire your own inquiry into the different stories of this landscape:
- This railway line was born of the 1884 Railway Act, colloquially known as the Octopus act for the final tendrils it sent out into each Victorian electorate… By coincidence, a decade before the line’s first sod was turned a diver dynamiting basalt lining the Moyne River found himself accosted by a massive octopus, a terrible devil fish who, once defeated in battle, was measured at eight feet across…
- Encounters with the mythical and terrifying great white shark Big Ben in nearby waters have been reported since at least the 1970s… The ancient megalodon who swam when the sea was above this landscape 10-15 million years ago, however, makes Ben look like a sardine: a single megalodon tooth is bigger than a man’s palm…
- As the coast has ebbed and flowed so too the land has morphed and buckled, the sea’s edge was once 50km further out at the continental shelf’s edge, before that it was joined to Antarctica. More recent history saw the landscape alive with the Newer Volcanics, Charged Landscape’s basalt boulders are taken from the Mt. Ruass lava flow which reached the sea here at Port Fairy.
- Aboriginal people have lived symbiotically with this landscape for tens of thousands of years. Their culture is so continuous here that the Tower Hill explosion of 30,000 years ago is embedded in their oral history. Local stone formed an important part of their technology, stones where used to grind food as well as pigments, used as axe heads and to form channel systems for wild eel farming.
- Colonial women are well hidden in Port Fairy’s history. Shrinking not into history’s shadows, however, is Annie Baxtor who briefly settled in Yambuck with her military husband. This infamous socialite is said to have raced horses against men. She was well known for her fabulous style but was not all pure of heart- she was also known to partake in violent assaults against the Guntjimarra.
- Despite degradation of wetland environments since European settlement they are among Australia’s most valuable environments, salt marshes such as the Belfast Locke are in fact among the highest ecological value in this class. They support a range of unique plant and animal species, including the small burrowing crayfish whose presence is noted by small holes with simple mud chimneys. Along with a pantheon of Australian bird life, the endangered orange bellied parrot and hooded plover also find shelter in this internationally recognized “Important Bird Area”.
We wish to thank the following people who contributed invaluable knowledge, support and resources to this artwork:
Micheal Steel and Bamstone,
Ian Bodycoat & the Port Fairy Rail Trail Committee
Fiona Clarke, Marcus Clarke, Brett Clarke and the “Gundjitmarra Elders Lunch”
John Sherwood and Dereck Walters, Geologists
Jarrad Obst of Glenelg Hopkins Catchment Management Authority
Jordan Lockett, Port Fairy musician & crafter of sea shanties
Marg Banks, local railway historian
Leonie Needham, local historian
Dr. Duane W. Hamacher, Senior Research Fellow in Indigenous Astronomy, Monash Indigenous Centre
We hope you enjoy your encounter with this charged landscape,
Jon Dixon & Becky Nevin Berger, March 2016
The Water Tower
Upstream Public Art Commission
This work was installed with the help of Dave Mitchell and Murray Adams in early October last year. It was a real pleasure to make, and a real treat to finally have a reason to engrave images onto acrylic sheet.
Gene Garden from Corangamite CMA helped me to come up with the short list of creatures to illustrate. They include the River Black Fish, the rare Grayling, Southern Pigmey Perch, a Fat Tailed Dunnart & a Tree Fern, a Spotted Quoll (possibly my new favourite animal) & a Beech Myrtle, a Platypus, an Otway-Yarra Spiny Yabby (an exquisite creature), a Sugar Glider, a Small Burrowing Crayfish and a beautiful Royal Spoonbill. Each of these beings depend of the Gellibrand River ecosystem in the Western Otway Ranges, the same river system that provides water for the townships of Warrnambool and Colac.
Now when my kids take too long in the shower I don’t just tell them that they are wasting the water, I tell them that they are wasting the river- it has immediate effects.
I was invited to make a speech at the opening, the following excerpt gives the best insight into the work. (Photo credits from that evening go to David Owen)
I replied to the EOI put out by Heytesbury Landcare in June because I found it’s goal of increasing understanding of where our water comes from fitted with work I had been doing in my own art practice.
In 2012 I began a Visual Art PhD that concentrated on the connection between the individual and the environment.
I spent the first year of my research looking at the landscape around here and around my childhood home in Murray river and Hume Weir country near Albury-Wodonga. I considered ideas about nature, I looked at the ways we have shaped the landscape and how it shapes us.
I spent the second year looking solely at my domestic home, looking at the different habits, interactions and activities that we do to create the dependable routines that produce the stability and security that we generally feel within our homes.
Whilst at first glance it may appear that these two areas of research, the landscape and the domestic home, describe separate spaces, what I actually found was the extent to which these spaces are utterly intertwined, and it was the very simple, very ordinary material of water that gave me the key.
I had drawn a picture of my bathroom basin with water running from its tap and a wave breaking out over the side of the basin- I had drawn the tap water clear and drawn the wave using the colours that we would expect to find out here in the southern ocean. This simple difference gave away underlying distinctions that I had made between my domestic home and the so-called natural world.
Around this time I came across a question posed by Canberra artist Marily Cintra “Do we realise that when we open a tap in Canberra we are diverting the river into our homes.”
I realized that this was a question that many of us here in Warrnambool should consider more carefully, many of us do not even realise that the Gellibrand flows into our homes.
My sculpture, which I have called “The Water Tower” makes reference to the humble domestic shower. Etched into each of the acrylic panels you will find just a handful of the many other species who make their homes in the Gellibrand and its catchment area.
Despite the top paddles looking as though they should move, they do not, in fact there is only one part of the sculpture that does move- the hot & cold taps on either side of the central panel.
When you look at the creatures etched and get that warm little feeling & awe at nature’s beauty this sculpture asks you to consider the primary that way that you already interact with those creatures- and that you please, bare them in mind you use the hot and cold taps in your own home.
BEAMS Festival 2015
It was great to see my work fully installed for the 2015 BEAMS Festival in Chippendale. The very generous residents of this terrace were happy to lend their entrance to the festival for the evening. This space was a perfect fit for my piece, Shower Funnel Wave Form/Standing in this River on its way out to the Sea, it created the sense of enclosure needed to build on the work’s reference of taking a shower.
As the sun went down the street came to life with lights, performance and the hustle of viewers. The light on my work worked brilliantly, helping to generate a sense of an individual space as well as creating a dynamism.
The soundscape was just loud enough to pull people in to listen closer to the work.
I was super stoked to see that my work had been chosen as the face of the BEAMS App too!
Here’s the blurb that accompanied my work:
‘Shower Funnel Wave Form – Standing in this river on its way out to the sea’
Berger’s work seeks to make visible the multi dimensions of time that intertwine with space and matter to create the fullness of reality. The installation consists of a suspended semi-spiral of fleshy storm clouds morphing into a barreling wave from which the resonant sounds of a domestic shower are emitted. “Within the reliable solitude of our daily shower, we are able to turn inward and we are made anew by the washing away of our day and become cleansed; in reality, we are amidst the water cycle, an ancient river diverted into our home. The work recreates and celebrates this daily embrace with nature, and our relationship with the mysterious substance, water”.
Berger has spent considerable time observing domestic space and urban environment looking to pierce the regularity of its stable, constructed surfaces and to coax out both its fluidity and the invisible, over-lapping and coexisting connections that create the spatial-temporal multi-dimensionality of lived reality. In this work Berger uses painting, sculpture and sound to imagine a romantic natural form that sits somewhere between Eugene von Guerard’s gold lit landscapes and James Gleeson’s fresh morphed terrains.
Standing in this River on Its way out to the Sea…
I responded to the artist brief announced as Phenomena late last year. I found that the brief was congruent with my own goals of finding ways to imagine to embodied and material magic that it is to be awake in a living breathing universe. I created this odd, warm form through an intuitive process- I felt the kind of shape that wanted to be made and worked my way through from there.
I laboured over this painterly sculpture through summer and early Autumn and submitted my application to the Beams Festival in March. I was caught by complete surprise when I read an email in early July letting me know that my work was accepted into the festival program, wow!! How exciting to have such a super cool reason to go to Sydney for a complete treat of an art festival 🙂
http://beamsfestival.com.au/whats-on/
http://beamsfestival.com.au/whats-on/artistic-works/becky-nevin-berger/
I really let my heart and my imagination run free with this work. It is titled Shower Funnel Wave Form/Standing in this River on Its way out to the Sea. It is made form a recycled paper and plaster compound and painted in layers of acrylic polymer paint. Embedded within the funnel is a speaker that plays the sound of a running shower. This work draws out understanding of the relationship between humans and the environment that have emerged through my PhD research.
It is a big surreal and romantic ode to water, it is a French kiss to nature.
Tomorrow we hit the road to journey 12 hours to Sydney so that this artwork may meet the world, wish me luck!
Playing with space… testing out installation ideas at Scope Galleries
I was fortunate to have a space for a week at Scope Galleries at the start of September in order to test out installation approaches for my PhD Research project entitled Activating Aesthetic Subjectivity in Embodied Environments. The need to test out ideas in the flesh became apparent after a recent trip to ANU to meet with my supervisors. Pursuing a practice led project off-campus can be a tricky situation. For much of my almost four years of research I have spent time imagining how my final installation will unfold- I am at that point now where I need to begin earthing these ideas out to see what works, how is fits together and what comes next.
Whilst I have presented installation from my research in the last year or so they have been based around a single work that creates a single space. Just as the title of my blog suggests, however, I am interested in processing the multi-dimensionality of spaces: Metabolic Synaesthete… synaesthesia being the cross wiring of the sense that I experience and that so drives my creative practice.
So with this experimental space I am bringing together particular lines of thought/studio practice in order to see a) how to further develop them b) how they interact with the other lines of thought c) to see what kind of spaces I can create d) to see what themes/feelings/concepts/aesthetics further emerge…
It begins with layering the floor with spent town planning maps to play with ideas about constructing spaces. & then laying out two bodies of work: my Watershed Dinner Set; my Orange Photo Boxes
Orange Photo Boxes…
adding domestic furniture to build on the sense of warmth and home….
spiral waves, water forms- ebb & flow, entropy & renewal, fluidity, change, cleanliness, clarity…
relationships and interplays
Using video and sound (audio of a washing machine) to fill the space, and to create movement
Splitting video with mirrors- like a digital sky space… cool as results, definitely further exploration to be had…
Playing with this space was so fruitful, it has left me with a bunch of ideas to develop & plans to set up another experimental space just as soon as I can
Up Stream Public Art Work
Earlier this year the Warrnambool Community Garden put out an Expression of Interest for the creation of an installation/interpretive signage that acts to educate the public on the water cycle and the impact of domestic water use on natural ecosystems. The project is part of a longer term campaign by the Heytesbury District Landcare Group’s “Going Upstream” project.
I thought that this could be right up my alley and put together a proposal for how I would approach the work. In July I got the phone call to say that my idea had been selected and that the committee wanted me to get started right away…
The idea I put forward was for the creation of an outdoor sculpture that would mimic a domestic shower and convey the interconnection of our domestic life with the ecosystems in which we are situated. This is part of broader conceptual themes that have developed through my PhD Research which began back in 2012. My research is concerned with how we imagine and understand our connection to our environment- I have been looking to find the material basis for this connection which is so readily felt yet much harder to directly see.
In my first year of research I spent a great deal of time looking at and research the Australian landscape around Warrnambool and around my ancestral home near Albury Wodonga. I spent the second year of my research focused on my more immediate environment, the domestic home that I share with my husband and our three children. Through these processes the extent to which these apparently disjointed spaces overlap and permeate each other became more and more evident. Within this context water emerged as an importable symbol of this interconnection and interchange.
In 2013 I visited the exhibition Talking Water at Craft ACT: Craft + Design Centre Gallery, Canberra. It was an exhibition of work created through an artist in residency program in which four artists use creative practice as a basis to examine our relationship with water. In the catalogue I found a rather profound and simple question from artist Marily Cintra,
“Do we realise that when we open a tap in Canberra we are diverting the river into our homes?
This question prompts us to reconsider the apparent division between our mundane and ordinary domestic worlds and the natural world which we imagine as being “out there”, beyond our urban lives.
The sculpture that I offered in my proposal is one that hopes to develop this line of thinking, one that hopes to stimulate the realisation that when we stand in the shower, wash our clothes, water our gardens or brush our teeth, we are doing so in a river. The Gellibrand River in the Otway Rainforest provides a large amount of Warrnambool’s drinking water. This sculpture aims to honour that particular ecosystem.
The sculpture is a fairly simple structure that mimics or recalls a domestic shower. It will be made from reclaimed timber- kindly donated by the W’Bool Community Garden, coloured acrylic sheet and metal work created by the very talented local craftsman Murray Adams. The top of the structure will have two layers of metal framed, coloured acrylic paddles into which I will etch the images of different plant, bird, animal and fish species that depend on the Gellibrand River.
I am heading out to Murray’s shed this afternoon to see how the metal work is progressing. I have order my acrylic sheet and commenced the drawings from which my etchings will be made- here’s a sample of my colour scheme:
I am pretty excited to see what will emerge from this process. It will all be installed and ready for the public by the second weekend of October… what this space
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