Exploring sense of place through art
Olivia Mulligan, School of Geosciences
Art reacts intuitively to its environment. Music, movies and visual arts often bring acute awareness to our experience as individuals and communities existing, feeling and moving in our spaces.1 However, creative art as a practice can also promote alternative ways of being inside and feeling spaces outside of our usual tendencies.2
A commitment to this “performative value” of art is embedded in the conceptual artist’s work Professor Daniel Peltzwho led this year’s inaugural Gilbert Fellowship lecture, How to enter the place, held in October. Peltz, who is visiting the University of Sydney in collaboration with SEI and from the Helsinki Academy of Fine Arts, specializes in place- and situation-specific art. In his performance, he demonstrated his interest in “unbridled” and “restrained” curiosity through artistic practice. His projects have reached a wide audience, involving local and international communities, artists and performers, and combining different forms of media. His talk revealed how creative artistic practice can work to draw attention to our changing roles and knowledge of the environment in which we find ourselves.
To enter a location: a philosophical exercise
Peltz opened the lecture with a recording of his then-seven-year-old daughter reading aloud a brief reflection on how to get in. He told the audience to imagine arriving at the site like an unemployed elephant – referring to elephants hired to collect wood harvested from Burma teak plantations in Myanmar, but out of work because the trade became unprofitable. The refugee-like state of precariousness of these unemployed elephants repeatedly emerges in his works as they represent anything, person or place, that copes with the displacement of labor and the cycles of production and consumption. He highlighted how the elephant’s embodiment of uncertainty challenges conventional spatial and temporal boundaries; Stepping inside as if “we were always already inside” can help us embrace our changing identity in relation to the place and at the same time revalue the space (for example, the asylum as an internship). It can also allow us to feed into the location some information and connection, but doesn’t care about anything certain knowledge or goal in that situation – which enables insights or situations to develop organically.
Tom Price Case Study: when we dig, things come up
After this exercise, Peltz presented one of his site-responsive projects. Project, when we dig things come up was developed between 2013 and 2015 in the regional iron ore mining community of Tom Price in Western Australia. It was commissioned as part of the Spaced biennial art event series, a biennial ‘memory of the future’ exhibition that aims to promote and showcase contemporary socially engaged and contextually responsive art. This art project contributed to this goal by drawing attention to Tom Price’s identity as defined by the mining operations of the American steel manufacturer Kaiser Steel Ltd.
Acknowledging his American roots, Peltz found that arriving in the city with the intention of conducting research corresponded to Kaiser Steel Ltd. Vice President Tom Price’s actions on the ground more than 50 years earlier. The town and its community continue to be involved in the exploitation and export of hematite deposits in the Hamersley area of the Pilbara region for processing to China and Japan.3 The two-part work consisted of the Opera – performed in Mandarin Chinese by the Chinese Peking Opera Company – and a series of Chinese landscape paintings of the area that re-enacted the story of Price’s “founding” of the city. Several smaller representations were carefully and thoughtfully executed to reflect the spatial manipulation of city and community value. These included collating information “picked up” from encounters with members of the local community, setting a “minimum quality standard of 65 percent” for the works, and shipping these works along the same trade routes as iron ore in order for the manuscript to be written. Peltz said, “…I was interested in these forms – Peking opera and Chinese landscapes like iron ore; I have an affinity for iron ore, a resource embedded in the Chinese landscape that I could unearth and use to process this “narrative ore”. [Tom] Price.”4