Description

Soil Stories of Coranderrk (2023)
Stories shared by Wandin family members
with Megan Cope and Keg de Souza

chromatography paper, silver nitrate, various soil samples from Coranderrk selected and sourced with the guidance of Wandin Family members, glass and metal.
11 parts; 33 cm diam. each

With the guidance of the Wandin Family the artists have collected samples of soil from significant places throughout the site that hold specific histories and as well as cultural memories. Acknowledging that Place is multiple, complex and interrelated, these stories of Place that have been held through the soil and are shared through these mappings. Place is alive within the soil, these maps literally hold Place in them.

Through soil chromatography the images create marks on paper resembling the inner rings of trees or even fungi, in this work the artists seek to reveal depths of the earth, the microscopic elements create landscape images through the chromatography, as the soil striates and spreads across the paper.

Commissioned by Tarrawarra Museum of Art for The Soils Project, 5 August – 12 November 2023, brings together 13 practitioners and collectives from Australia, the Netherlands and Indonesia to explore the complex and diverse relationships between environmental change and colonisation.

The exhibition is the latest iteration of an ongoing research-based experimental project developed in collaboration with leading contemporary arts museum the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands and Struggles for Sovereignty, a collective based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The Soils Project arises from specific and situated practices that each of the participants and artists brings to their understanding of soil, as both metaphor and matter.