Gudgenby - traces

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Craft ACT Gallery One, Two and Crucible: 27 May - 12 June 2010

Gudgenby traces

Gudgenby traces was officially opened by Zsuzsi Soboslay. Soboslay is a writer, performer, reviewer, exhibition curator, and illustrator with a special interest in ecology and shamanic awareness. She has written extensively about artists' practices and process, particularly with reference to history and environment. Gudgenby traces was informed by the 2009 artist-in-residence project at the Gudgenby Ready-Cut Cottage in Namadgi National Park. The project provided residencies for two artists, Paull McKee and Kirstie Rea. The exhibition featured installations inspired by their time spent living in the national park.

Artists change how we think about the world.

Zsuzsi Soboslay, June 2010

The Namadgi National Park is located to the southwest of Canberra. Part of the Australian Alps, it is flanked by farming properties and conservation areas. Park Rangers manage many issues including feral pigs, weed infestations and post-fire rehabilitation, as well as its ongoing use by recreational users for skiing in winter and bushwalking throughout the year. Within this region, nestled in the Gudgenby Valley, the Gudgenby Ready-Cut Cottage is a curiosity. Amongst the 90 or so surviving alpine bush huts maintained by the Kosciusko Huts Association, this pre-fabricated kit-home - one of the first of its kind - is an urban type of dwelling originally built on cleared farmland, but now surrounded by protected native bush.

The Gudgenby Valley is in a complex state of transition. Former stock fences are falling to the ground. Tor-like rocks look over native grasses encroached by invasive thistle weeds, whilst platypus splash in the Gudgenby River. Dingoes howl in the pre-dawn, as they have done for centuries, and at dusk stalk and kill kangaroos. Further down the dirt road is Yankee Hat, a significant rock art site treasured by local Ngunnawal Aborigines, protected by the Park, and respected by many hundreds of visitors. On the cold May weekend I visit, about 15 woolly-hatted children and their respective parents trek back from a viewing in the brittle late afternoon.

This part of the National Park is a complex area to manage. Recently, community group discussions over the maintenance of non-indigenous alongside indigenous vegetation reflect differing views on land use and managing our 'wild' places. But as Ranger-in-Charge, Bernard Morris points out, this kind of debate is a long-standing and inherently positive one, with people passionate enough to care, passionate enough to argue their point of view.

He points out that National Parks are neither 'natural' nor a fixed entity, but are themselves a cultural construct, defined in relationship to urban environments which value [or do not] wild spaces as areas of conservation. The various National Parks Acts, passed throughout Australian states and territories in the late 19th Century, both want to protect Parks from urban push, yet carry a sense of protecting urban and farming areas from invasion by them. As well, there is an expectation that the Parks be available for recreational use by urban citizens who may or may not quite understand and hence know how to respect them.

In 2009, Namadgi National Park's management body made an agreement with Craft ACT: Craft and Design Centre to hand over the Gudgenby Ready-Cut Cottage to two artists for residencies. In a surprise to all involved, the project won the 2009 Urban Landcare award. It was praised by the ACT judging panel for the way it built interesting partnerships, brought new audiences to both the arts and the National Parks via its exhibitions and Open days, and created awareness of new ways of thinking about human relationship to land. Artists Paull McKee and Kirstie Rea each spent five weeks immersed in the experience of this landscape and its complex histories.

A few years previously, McKee, under the project management of Craft ACT: Craft and Design Centre, had initiated research and installations in three of the smaller alpine huts, the Brayshaws, Waterhole and Westermans, working alongside Dan Maginnity and Joanne Searle. The artists' three exhibitions reflected on tensions between contemporary and historical cultures, the fragility of the huts [30% of which were lost to the 2003 bushfires in the ACT and NSW] and the lost lives of its itinerant and sometimes more permanent residents.

The Gudgenby project was structured differently. The point was less to produce art than to experience and live within all the site's complex realities for a longer period of time, and see what resulted from this experience. Ranger Morris relates how he himself moved from a place of suspicion - from "what do they want? - to an interest in 'how are they thinking, what are they learning, what do they give?"

Interestingly, Morris sees there could be parallels between the life of Parks and those of artists themselves, with perhaps both perceived as generally 'remote' from mainstream awareness. "Maybe 97% of the population don't even think of the Park as having anything to do with them," he says. Yet "the human process of seeing, experiencing and interpreting" - indeed, an act of reciprocation - is what is exciting and critical to all land-management endeavours. "That's what we Rangers [and, I think, most of us in some way] have to do every day of our lives."

Barbara McConchie, former Executive Director of Craft ACT: Craft and Design Centre and at the helm of the project since its inception, says that the chief sponsor of the project, the ACT Natural Resource Management Council, took a risk in moving outside of its core business [as did in fact Craft ACT: Craft and Design Centre]. The Council recognised a potential overlap of interests.

"This project highlighted the way unusual partnerships can create new ways of seeing and reflecting on the world", she said. "Different approaches and opinions were exchanged, but we saw a surprising congruence of values as well. I think the Landcare judges saw that the artists' work and their discussions during open days reflecting many diverse ways of relating to the land."

This kind of approach, placing high value on sustaining and maintaining astute, responsive and ethical relationships, is gaining leverage in areas as diverse as human resources and holistic land management practices. What do we value/consider/listen to, in the face of so many different histories, realities and needs? Hitherto it's been unusual to link the notion of ethics with arts practice, but, as a result of such projects, where artists live in intimate reciprocation with wild environments, this is precisely what such projects seem to assist to achieve.

Both resident artists - Rea and McKee - underwent a transformation of their own visions. Rea, an internationally recognised glass artist, has temporarily let go of using the medium with which she identifies, her medium of expertise. Instead, her exhibit represents her experience of emptiness in the valley with lines of wool thread hung across the gallery space, sketching the outline of mountain ranges, the entry gate, and Cottage balcony. With these outlines she foregoes 'objects' in favour of recreating a sense of Gudgenby's 'ghost voices', its sense of space, volume, and vacancies.¹

McKee, a textile artist who has long worked with collected textiles such as cloth and blanket re-backed and re-combined as mementoes of lives long gone, now understands his work as preserving stories, representing hope rather than loss. Perhaps nature's continuity worked its way through his bones. His works perhaps exhibit a new kind of transparency.

More than survival

The Kosciusko Huts Association publishes a brochure informing people about safe use of the huts it care-takes. These brochures also relate stories of mishaps and adversities in these parts of the bush - lives lost in snowstorms; huts burnt by fires. But there are probably thousands more stories of which we never hear. These would include the non-human stories which have, somewhere, left their trace - tragic or joyous - in the topography of the landscape or the rings of the trees. Immersion projects - perhaps even more so when artists and their sensitivities are involved - allow for dialogue with and mirroring of the lives and 'thoughts' of these things too.

In these days of urgent concern around rapid climate change and the longer-term effects of human action, maybe 'right answers' will become less significant than discovering new ways of relating, of listening, and of increasing a systemic dialogue in these landscapes, so that we – craft and design organisations, artists, Parks workers, decision-makers, the public in general - can become aware and at best, be transformed by what we learn.

The national finals of the Landcare Australia Awards were held in Canberra on the evening of June 24.

• Zsuzsi Soboslay
• June 2010

Footnotes

1. The work pays homage to the wool thread work of Fred Sandback [New York, 1980s], but is nonetheless a distinctive interrogation of the Gudgenby landscape and the sensations of being in that place.