Holes [working title]
Holes [working title] (2018)
Holes [working title] was a project I facilitated at Our Neon Foe, culminating in a publication, by the same name, and included contributions in work, thinking, discussions, and experiments from: Kate Beckingham, Maggie Brink, Clare Britton, Barbara Campbell, Laura Carthew, Carolyn Craig, Saskia Doherty, Lyn Heazlewood, Jana Hawkins-Andersen, Christoph Herbig, Louisa King, Nikki Lam, Gillian Lavery, Llewellyn Millhouse, Biljana Novakovic, Les Prest, Margaret Roberts, Kat Sawyer, Saskia Schut, Jacqui Shelton, Harald Stäuble, Leyla Stevens, Bryden Williams, Gary Warner, and Vickie Zhang.
This project took place at Our Neon Foe, 411 Parramatta Road, Leichhardt, throughout the month of October 2018. At the front of the building is a gallery/project space. It’s a shop front, with big windows and glass doors that open up onto the street. Behind the gallery are studios, and at the very back of the building is one I share with Kat Sawyer.
At an archaeological excavation, layers of earth are sedimented as strata, signifying distinct periods in time. As hands and dirt come together within a hole, these layers become mixed, disparate histories come into contact with one another, and the bottom of the pit becomes a muddy mess. Excavation produces spaces where moments of encounter – between hand and hand, hand and material, between various layers of time – allow for developments and problematics of shared histories and shared knowledges to take place.
For Holes [working title], an excavated hole has been figuratively divided into two parts. The bottom of the hole: an ambiguous space of shifting earth and unfixed histories, of mixing contexts. The top of the hole: where material drawn from the ground touches the atmosphere, and is made public as it moves between people and places.
Holes [working title] is a vertical reimagining of the building housing both gallery and studio, as a hole. The gallery operates as the ground-surface – a space where material spreads out and is made visible, where ideas unravel and become public – and my studio takes on characteristics of the bottom of the hole – a space where ideas are mixed and muddied (the bowels of the building, a space of working-through, a digestive space). Here, a ‘hole’ is used as a model for thinking through relationships between spaces of production and presentation (studio and gallery), and also a framework for distinct practices to come into productive contact with one another (through shared events/making processes/discussions/performances etc.).
This book gathers dust, re-orders thoughts, catalogues events, and accumulates content over the project’s duration.
I want to express my immense gratitude to all those who contributed to Holes [working title] for their good humour, patience, and inspiring practices. A very special thanks goes to Kat Sawyer for her ongoing willingness to share a studio with me in the face of total chaos.
