One of my first impressions of Ballarat came from an encounter with Inge Kings large, graceful sculpture Grand Arch in Alfred Deakin Place near the Art Gallery of Ballarat. I knew that Inge was a rarity in the era of Australian modernist sculpture – a woman and a migrant who had taught herself to weld in the late 1950s and began making significant public artworks in the 1970s. Against some significant odds, Inge had become big, really big in the history of Australian public art.
The presence of Grand Arch in Ballarat told me that this was a place that valued Inge’s life and work. A place that cared that a woman had worked hard to be seen and recognised in a male dominated art world. Inge’s presence pointed to female leaders who had made their mark on this city; it was no surprise to discover that former Gallery Director Margaret Rich was instrumental in the commissioning of Grand Arch in Ballarat. And today I see it as a symbol for the intelligent and considerate female arts leaders around me encouraging us that our work and the stories we tell are important and can bring about change.
Remember —those arms holding you felt like someone was slowly carving your name in sandstone. Like they wanted to remember you always, to walk carrying a small piece of you; their pocket heavy with an unexpected gift. Like you were a found treasure, a small piece of perfectly formed wood that they want to hold on to. Don’t let go of that feeling of being there; suspended in time, waiting.
John Muir wrote that nature “is eternally flowing from use to use, beauty to yet higher beauty; and we soon cease to lament waste and death, and rather rejoice and exult in the imperishable, unspendable wealth of the universe, and faithfully watch and wait the reappearance of everything that melts and fades and dies about us, feeling sure that its next appearance will be better and more beautiful than the last.”
That is the feeling I have now. Nothing was wasted with you and within the perfect part of nature we faithfully inhabited, over and over together; because a part of me believes in a higher beauty. After I melt away this time, I will calm myself like the sea. After all, we are all made of salt and we are all made of water. And one day our carved names will all fade and recede in the sandstone.
Carolyn Conners, Eliza and Marcelle Benchmo performing in The Crossing by Jill Orr. Photo: Naomi Herzog and Malcolme Cross.
Jill Orr The Crossing Mildura Wenthworth Arts Festival 2007
From conception to final curtain call, Jill Orr’s evocative performance The Crossing belongs to Mildura’s Lock Island. It was while researching for a painting show and exploring the 15 hecture bushland of Lock Island that Orr had visions of a mad missionary beating himself with a bible, a lost Malay immigrant crying in terror and a ghostly tree spirit nymph. Some would have taken these imaginings and put them where sleep could cure them but Orr decided to make art.
“The whole story for The Crossing came to me – the overlapping histories of this place, the scar tree on the island, the missionaries that arrived there is the 1800s. There is a part of Mildura’s history that we can easily find in the history books but I wanted to scratch a little deeper, seek out some of the unspoken histories of the characters who have been here,” said Orr.
Peter Peterson performing in The Crossing by Jill Orr. Photo: Naomi Herzog and Malcolme Cross.
Lock Island was formed when the Murray River channel was dug separating lock and weir in 1927. For many thousands of years prior and to this day, Lock Island and the surrounding area has been sacred for Traditional Owners who passed through and crossed the river at this point between the river red gums. The Latji Latji people’s occupation of this land has been dated to approximately 40,000 years ago based on the discovery of middens, burials and campsites.
Whilst living on stations, such as the Yelta Mission on the south bank of the Murray River opposite Wentworth, many people experienced forced confinement, the imposition of strict religious observance, separation and removal of their children and a systematic breakdown of traditional values through banning of language and cultural practice.
“The relationship between the missionary men and women and the Koorie people was historically fraught. The Crossing unveils other fraught relationships; that of the missionary man with his own beliefs; of the district nurses, who helped with so many births in the Koorie community. The arrival of the nurses was historically too late to assist in the near decimation of the Koori population by smallpox,” Orr explained.
Difficult internal narratives are overtly present in the work, as the audience walks across the bridge to Lock Island to see two nurses and children dressed in eighteenth century costumes arrive at twilight by boat. The boat is not a wooden row boat but rather an aluminium dingy, suggesting that this performance will refer to historic events while keeping one foot firmly in the present. The nurses singing joins the echo of cicadas across the still, warm evening air as they begin to wash out blood soaked bandages.
Craig Peade performing in Jill Orr’s The Crossing. Photo: Naomi Herzog and Malcolm Cross.
Into this softly lit scene bursts a missionary tearing at his robes and pounding his body with a bible. As if not to let the audience suffer this madness to long, we are moved around the island by torch light to a clearing where Tony Yap emerges performing a Butoh-inspired rendition of a man lost, desperately crying for help. Between each performance are minutes of silent reflection on the tranquility and scale of the bush surrounding Lock Island and the Murray River.
Jill Orr has worked as a performance artist and painter since the late 1970s primarily using her body as the site for creating provocative imagery. In 2003 Jill’s practice shifted toward collaboration when she began work on the multi-projection video installation From the Sea, devised with Gudijimara Traditional Owners, 40 young dance students and a number of creative collaborators.
“I had reached a point where I needed to go outside myself. I don’t feel like I have too many things inside me that I need to work out anymore. That’s where working in collaboration with many different people has been useful to my process,” says Orr. “In beginning The Crossing I told a friend about these dreams I has been having and she put me in touch with (Mildura Wentworth Festival Director) Helen Healy who arranged for me to meet Raeleen Berriman from the NSW TAFE Koori Unit. As an outsider, I need to begin with these connections, I need permission and a desire to work together.”
Orr ended up working with Berriman’s students, who created artworks placed around the island and Peter Peterson who directed and performed with a number of his students from the Victorian College of Koori Education. “A lot of work was put in to establishing those key relationships. I needed completely open communication with the collaborators on the project.” Open communication was what Orr felt she had until a few weeks out from the performance when she discovered that a language barrier had prevented a key performer from reading the storyline that she had provided early in the work’s conception. “I suddenly thought, oh no what if they don’t know that there is a mad missionary character in there?”
Emma Strapps performing in The Crossing by Jill Orr. Photo: Naomi Herzog and Malcolme Cross.
“Working in this way forces you to let go. You learn to go through the process of creating work without getting too phased by little mistakes,” said Orr. “As the director of a work where the audience moves over 1 kilometre or more, there’s no way that I could be in all places at once, so I learnt to let each incarnation of the performance happen in an organic way. The structure of the work needed to be flexible enough to accommodate nightly differences.”
Other performers were chosen for their ability to develop characters using unique performance styles and improvisation methods. At times in the performance Jill deftly contrasts the highly-trained dance styles of the professional Butoh and contemporary dancers with the traditional Koori performers, here we get to see the difference and similarity of the ancient occupants of this place and the recent arrivals.
In an unapologetic act, an Elder dispatches the mad interlopers that have found there way to the Koorie children by slitting their throats. Then the final scene of The Crossing is upon us. We move to a small, moonlit beach where the traditional dances are performed for for a final time backed only by the sound of didgeridoo and clap sticks. It is a subtle and solemn ending reminding us of the vast history of this place.
“Under the dynamic of an audience and light, things happen. And it’s that ‘bang’, that thing happening – that’s communication”
– Jill Orr
This article has been revised for publishing on this blog. First published in Groundwork Magazine, Issue 5, 2007. With thanks to Jill Orr.
Image: Receptive – Front desk cut through to wall, Ceiling cut through the wall and fall to floor, dust traces, Robbie Rowlands, 2019
Review: Robbie Rowlands Incremental Loss National Centre For Photography, Mitchell Family Gallery 24 February – 10 March 2019
“The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster” writes Elizabeth Bishop in her loved poem One Art.
The first bank of one of Australia’s oldest gold mining towns, Ballarat is a building that feels full of the intent to be lost. It is an onion with many layers waiting for the artist to begin to peel. It is a building waiting for demolition and for the beginning of a new life as the National Centre for Photography a new initiative of the Ballarat International Foto Biennale.
The art that Robbie Rowlands is mastering in Incremental Loss is that of revealing and also somehow concealing. This is not vandalism or destruction. Each room has a hidden story; but we sense, from the purposeful way wall edges have been trimmed and carefully bent in rhythmic arrangements, that the sole aim might not be to reveal the building’s past. Rather, it is creation of a new story educed both from the history of this place and from the urgency of what the building will (incrementally) become.
Image: Last breath – Olivetti Multisumma 20 – 1964 – 2019, Looped paper roll, final calculation, Robbie Rowlands, 2019
I know from my training in heritage values assessment that there is a natural tension between a heritage building’s ‘originality’— it’s beautiful, historic architectural features — and the layers of often less beautiful, but equally intriguing, parts altered by its occupation. These are the features Rowlands works with. The discarded ‘Olivetti Multisumma’ calculator, the built-in front desk, the false ceilings and walls, each a layer of occupational disaster and debris. These additions speak to the people, jobs and ghosts of this former bank, insurance office and home of Ballarat mixed small business. Like the footprints Rowlands leaves in the carpet in his video work, Standing for the Light(ness) all these things reveal human occupation and eventual abandonment of the space.
Image: Standing for the light(ness), Video 2min on loop, Film capture of reflective light, Compression of carpet through body warmth and weight, Robbie Rowlands, 2019
We often think that more recent additions to heritage buildings inadvertently and rather carelessly strip away heritage values. When we enter the space where Rowlands has cut away a wall to reveal a beautifully preserved mint green 1940s stove in the work ‘I was always here’, or where a ceiling has been delicately cut to reveal a perfectly intact decorative ceiling rose in ‘Contemplating the fall’, we sigh at the thought that these things might have been removed but thankfully were only concealed. And our minds wander to the tragedy of other special items that may have been lost from this place.
However, next week when the exhibition is over, the building begins to take its first baby steps as the National Centre for Photography. When works begin to reveal and restore significant and stunning architectural features, other less assuming aspects will be lost. The 1970s dado panelled walls that tell the story of office workers in front of now foreign-looking calculating machines and the stiff grey carpet that has felt the impression of bank clerk’s 1960s loafers will soon be gone. Heritage restoration is ironically often a process of losing history in order to create new narratives. The old bank is now poised to house international photography and demonstrate successful adaptive reuse in which the ‘in between’ bits of this building, that do not belong to its majestic past nor to its illustrious future, must be lost.
Image: I was always here, wall and veneer shelving cut, 1940-50 wood stove reveal, Robbie Rowlands, 2019
“Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and
where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster…
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have
lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may
look like (Write it!) like disaster.”
The artist’s art here is to
practice losing farther, losing faster those additions that call him to the act
of gentle demolition. Incremental Loss
calls us to move with thought amongst the debris. We become a witness to what
will be lost over time, objects and images briefly highlighted for us to
contemplate their fading.
