Sixteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Today, maps are unlikely to say Terra Incognita as they used to up until the early twentieth century. Now the earth is recorded from every vantage point imaginable, above and below ground. We can trace rivers and nomadic trails, city limits and country borders. Physically and digitally our world is laid out before us, but as author Rebecca Solnit points out, “behind every map’s information is what’s left out, the unmapped and unmappable”. What is mapped of places is colored by public intentions, personal experiences, cultural and historical significance. The exhibition Talking Place raised questions about how individuals perceive and experience place through creative practice in the face of such complexities. Lake Walyungup in Western Australia is the site where four printmakers, a bricoleur and a sound artist converged to collaboratively examine a place with a multitude of meanings. Lake Walyungup is a shallow salt lake, 50km south of Perth with geological importance as a site of stromatolite remains, significance to the Noongar community and an obscure history of use by armed forces for training purposes. This paper examines Talking Places with reference to Malpas’ understanding of place as a container of memory and Ingold’s suggestion that walking is integral to our knowledge of places. I evaluate how six artists drew together disparate elements of the same place and mapped the unmappable through creative practices encompassing traditional printmaking methods combined with drone technology and Lidar survey scanning in a synthesis of techniques that expand the boundaries of print.