This residency involved visits and photographic works that were developed in intervals over over the course of 2018 and 2019. These artworks utilised an extended residency process to incorporate camera-less photography and its capacity to trace the light and temporal aspects of the Quarantine station.
The residency took the form of field notes for the embodied exploration of the landscape. Many aspects of my experience were sensed and recorded via note taking, sound recordings and other digital means but this sat in an ancillary fashion around the process of tracing the space and movement of light, bodies and weather over the surface of photographic paper, which only registers a proportion of this as present, the rest is all absent from imprint. Sensing the greater echos of absence within the site itself.
Please visit other pages for more examples of the artwork developed and exhibited as part of Surreal Landscapes at Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery.
The below images belong to the digital navigation records taken during the January residency and are sketches of ideas taken from the site, alongside pinhole artworks and solargraphy cameras which were left insitu and developed over 6 and 12 mths at a time.
The Gatekeepers Cottage and the Quarantine Station:
The Gatekeeper’s Cottage is situated on the 17.5 hectare Police Point Shire Park, Portsea which has a rich history that played an important role in shaping the early settlement, quarantine and defence of Victoria. Point Nepean Peninsula is a nationally significant cultural heritage site ‘…located in the [traditional] lands of the Boon wurrung balug, one of at least six clans of the Bunurong/Boonwurrung who were part of the Kulin Nation of Central Victoria’ (Management and Conservation Management Plan, 2012). It intersects with Boon Wurrung and European cultural heritage and the present day.
My residency has been split into two seasons of exploration. Starting with the long light of summer and gentle sea breezes, it will then conclude in the low light and more rugged season of winter.
The initial visit was a way of exploring the site extensively and developing a greater knowledge of the way in which I can respond to the historic and social nature of quarantine and the sites defence past.
Images above are all taken while exploring the site and represent a recording of aspects of the site rather than the artistic work undertaken.