A Rock Chick’s Residency
I am pleased to have been selected for a West Darling Art’s Broken Hill Heritage Residency along with a group of other local artists.My focus will on the Albert Kersten Mining and Minerals Museum in Broken Hill and the Line of Lode (slag heap).
Rocks shape our worlds. Rocks are connected to climate change and to the extractive industries. Rocks enable all our electronic interactions and energy storage in batteries. Rocks are inscribed with notions of value as objects. Practices of extraction, though labour and through impacts on the environment, are entangled in ethics. Rocks are often thought of as being solid, immovable and unchanging but the reality is they are changing all the time and our relationship to them also changing. My project is to undertake a research residency into the nature of rocks and Broken Hill’s relationship to rocks.
Research will be through the Albert Kersten Mining and Minerals Museum and the Broken Hill City Library Archives. I propose to develop a model of Action Research where I am developing samples as content.
I aim to devise methods (through research) to explore the physical, social, cultural, historical, political, environmental mobilities of rocks; through strategies such as story-telling, touch, lens, sound, weaving and speculation.