Sixteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Artists reflect on their exhibition Talking Place: Emerging Connections, Gallery 25, Edith Cowan University, August 2020; a third iteration of a collaborative research project by four artists Monika Lukowska, Sarah Robinson, Annette Nykiel and Jane Whelan exploring the ecology of Perth’s wetlands in the broader realms of place, technology and contemporary art practice. This project began in 2017, within the thresholds of Lake Walyungup, Western Australia, a seemingly empty space amid growing urban communities with a deep history embedded in stromatolite remains and Noongar traditions. Discursive responses articulate the artists’ experiences, conveying the complexities of a place and emerging as a multidisciplinary exhibition involving printmaking, drawing, slow-making, and digital technology. Our endeavour is to explore, to connect, and to extend imaginatively and collaboratively with the materiality of ideas pondering: what new terrain might emerge from asking questions and creating problems while creatively investigating place. Through engagement in the field, exchange and conversation, the artists unravelled layers, hidden narratives, and spatial dimensions emphasising the complex nature of wetlands and their significance in the local and global context. Links have emerged connecting the initial site with other local, national and international wetlands through themes that consider what it means to be in this world; including both connection and disruption, and thinking and sensing through the ideas of phenomenologists Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Edward Casey, anthropologist Tim Ingold, and design anthropologist Sarah Pink. We have detected our own alternative views of the environment and updated our view in this conversation about ways of knowing.