Gudgenby Ready-Cut Cottage Residency

A pilot project inspired by the heritage pre-fabricated Gudgenby Ready-Cut Cottage, presented by Craft ACT: Craft and Design Centre in association with the Namadgi National Park, made possible with funding from Natural Resources Management Council.

Venturing Past an Idea

Catalogue
Forum
Image gallery

This catalogue captures the activities of a pilot artist in residence project at the Gudgenby Ready-Cut Cottage located in the Namadgi National Park, Australian Captial Territory, presented by Craft ACT: Craft and Design Centre and the Namadgi National Park. The pilot provided two residential periods of five weeks each to two artists, Paull McKee and Kirstie Rea. Both artists have strong contemporary craft and art based practices and both brought with them their own knowledge and experiences of this wonderful national park. The manifestations of this residency will emerge within their respective practices initially through a presentation of work immediately following their residencies, shown at the Namadgi National Park Visitors Centre, and in the long term as each artist realises new works that arise out of this experience and which will be shown in new exhibitions in the future.

The Gudgenby Ready-Cut Cottage is an early example of a ready-cut or prefabricated Hudson's kit home purchased and constructed by its original owner A W Bootes in the Gudgenby Valley in 1927. It later became the farm manager's home and fell into disrepair after the local government reclaimed the land for a National Park. It was through the efforts of a volunteer group, the Kosciuszko Huts Association (KHA), together with assistance and support from the ACT Government and Namadgi National Park staff, that it was restored, thereby ensuring its survival.

The Gudgenby Ready-Cut Cottage Residency was first mooted in 2005 at the conclusion of the project Memories in Place: art in high country huts. This project invited three artists Paull McKee, Joanne Searle and Daniel Maginnity to interpret the role and cultural importance of heritage and the environment, in particular three historic high country huts located in the Namadgi National Park. The resulting exhibition and temporary installations within the huts were diverse and evocative of the varied legacy of the settlers in this area. Craft ACT hosted a day long walking tour to the huts guided by the park rangers and supported by the KHA. The participants engaged with the artists' stories and viewed their works, learnt more about the huts and experienced the national park. This event was met with enthusiasm and evoked a strong demand for more activities combining art and nature. It became apparent to all involved that this unique collaborative project opened up opportunities to reach new audiences and engage with this important conservation, recreation and education precinct by building awareness and community participation.

In 2008 funding was successfully obtained for a pilot residency project through the Natural Resource Management (NRM) Council. The Council supports activities and research into water salinity, addressing emerging environmental issues, immediate risks or needs, and trialling new approaches including creative projects. It is a tribute to the NRM that it could see the merit in our proposal to enable two artists to make distinct creative responses to the landscape and take a different approach to engaging and interpreting place.

In trying to contextualise a project such as this it helps to listen to other stories. An increasing number of arts activities focus on our environment and look closely at the relationship between culture and nature. As Clive Adams, Director of the Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World, UK, puts it:

"Since the turn of the Millennium, world concern over environmental issues such as pollution and global warming, species depletion, new genetic technologies, AIDS, BSE and foot-and-mouth epidemics has increased. Artists, in turn, are responding by answering collective cultural needs and developing active and practical roles in environmental and social issues."¹

One such example is the case of Mono Lake. The former head of California's Resources Agency, Dr Huey D. Johnson, relates his story of the saving of Mono Lake, California. Amused by a group of environmentalists who took out a law suit against the powerful and wealthy city of Los Angeles to stop the city from taking the water from the streams that fed into the Mono Lake, Johnson like many others saw the legal action as a failure before it began. The environmentalist group knew they needed support and a public bike ride took place from the Los Angeles City Hall to Mono Lake, over the Sierra Mountains, where a bottle of water from an LA City Hall fountain was ceremonially poured into the diminishing lake. Yet it was not until artist Deborah Small was engaged that the lake's fortunes were changed. Johnson writes:

[Small created a ceramic brick] titled The Bathroom Site Project. On one side of the brick were instructions to place the brick in the water tank of a toilet to displace and thereby conserve a portion of the water in the tank. On another side of the brick was "One brick in every Los Angeles toilet tank could save Mono Lake. Yet it is so much cheaper to destroy it".

Johnson continues: The brick caught my interest as I looked at it on my desk each morning, and I acted by launching a series of statewide hearings on the subject. My strategy was to make LA defend its greed in public. The Los Angeles water officials had to show up at each hearing and defend their taking the water with the press there. The result was a summary document [… and the] lawsuit went our way. The court ordered LA to stop taking water from a critical stream. […]The legal victory was the historic establishment of a Public Trust obligation to maintain wild places. […]The astonishing part of the victory was that Natural Heritage values are a higher use than taking the stream's water for more development. The wording in the case is far-reaching and historic in future efforts to maintain the nation's wild places.²

The arts can create dialogue to encourage new ways of thinking and in 2008 Craft ACT hosted an exhibition that did precisely this titled Baselines: remnant grasslands of Weereewa/Lake George. This exhibition presented the work by artists Beth Hatton and Christine James, who were responding to the history and the present of the Willeroo property on the shores of Weereewa. George and Erica Gundry manage this property, originally using the traditional methods that had been practiced on this site by Gundry's family for generations. When drought and other conditions took their toll, he took radical steps to save the land by employing holistic farm management. This practice has ensured that biodiversity is being reinstated and the land, as both landscape and working property, has flourished in a way that seemed impossible just a few years ago. As part of the Baselines exhibition, Hatton constructed art works from materials collected from the land which provided a multi-layered interpretation to the history, colinisation, and the hybridization of the landscape.

In the exhibition catalogue curator Gillian McCraken notes the impact of this work as she describes Hatton's work as re-conceiving, an act of re-thinking in her essay:

Beth Hatton has reconceived the acts of establishing baselines for accurate surveying, clearing native forest and converting indigenous grass lands to high yield arable lands. She has reconceived the implements and tools of these processes using native grass species of the area and, where significant, she has incorporated introduced species. The contrary qualities of the native grasses, their resilience through climate changes and their apparent fragility is captured by Hatton in her work to remind us of our frequently insensitive trampling of undervalued native flora. However, her work emphasises: two hundred years of grazing and development have not suppressed native grasses and indigenous birds and marsupials.³

These stories are but two of many that talk of ways in which to engage, support, protect and commonly share our mutual environment by embedding it within our culture. History shows us that the human imprint always looms large and the tensions of the past, present and future are an ongoing dialogue that has no one answer or view point. Mark Cleghorn wrote in his essay⁴ for the Memories in Place project:

I spoke with national park authorities about how best to interpret the lost huts [after the 2003 bushfires]. The Kosciuszko Huts Association (KHA) believes one way is rebuilding them using similar materials and methods as the original. There were also the usual suggestions such as plaques and signage.[…] I started looking for other ways. Paull McKee, a textile artist, came up with the idea of interpreting the values of the huts through art, with an exhibition of artwork in three huts within Namadgi National Park. So I jumped on it! […] [I]nterpretation can be quite problematic. Everyone will have a different view. Perhaps the way it has been done through Memories in Place is a good way, as it has used a medium, art, that most people accept as not being anti heritage or anti environment.

The Gudgenby Ready-Cut Cottage Residency project could be an important ongoing project that contributes to the understanding of this landscape as one of cultural significance to the city and people of Canberra. If further support for this concept can be garnered then a rich repertoire of cultural practice will be directly associated with this national park. A program of artists based for short periods of time in the park will create a fertile archive of imaginative interpretations and create an opportunity for discourse and debate and importantly provide a way to hear and view the many stories of this land. The aim above all is to explore our nature through our culture and to cherish, protect and benefit from this national park environment.

Barbara McConchie,
Executive Director, Craft ACT: Craft and Design Centre
July 2009

Footnotes

Adams, C. 2002, A Brief Introduction, viewed 1 May 2009
Johnson, H. D. 2001, Art, Environment and the Message in the Brick, viewed 1 May 2009
McCraken, G. 2008, 'Baseline', Baseline: remanat grassland of Weereewa/Lake George exhibition catalogue, ACT, pp. 8-9
Cleghorn, M. 2005, 'Huts as a community asset', Memories in place: art in high country huts exhibition catalogue, Craft ACT: Craft and Design Centre, ACT, p. 33 & p. 36

The above essay and images are from the 28 page catalogue - artists in place - which can be ordered form Craft ACT for $5 (inc. GST)

Phone 02 6262 9333 or email craftact [at] craftact.org.au

Craft ACT: Craft and Design Centre