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Dawn Roe

SPE Member since 2004
Member Chapter: Southeast

Goldfield Studies

GOLDFIELD STUDIES

This work was produced in response to the disparate histories that permeate the bushlands of this eponymous region of Australia. Though not always visible, the abandoned mine shafts that pierce these grounds serve as markers, unearthing a complex web reaching back to the era of the first gold strikes the region is known for. This particular landscape, with its temporal shifts present in the form of both physical and psychic traces left by man and nature, proved to be a rich territory for extending my research on the perceptual inconsistencies between experienced and recorded time.

During my time in the Goldfields, I came to understand this space as repository of cultural memory constructed from the opposing perspectives of indigenous and colonial settler narratives, pastoral landscape representations, folklore and myth. Confronted with this past, I found myself looking to uncover the poignancy of present moments, and the fleeting resonance of immediate experience. My process combines a documentary approach with direct interventions in the landscape as well as constructions in the studio. Deliberately clunky fabrications incorporate gold fabric and other materials that refer to mining, while also echoing the unsettling imagery of gothic fairytales that intermingle with this space.

While the particulars of location are essential to this series, the site was ultimately secondary to my primary concerns around the discrepancies between space as experienced in the past, and as represented in the present. Only a glimpse of each setting is offered, with each scene representing a distinctly separate perception, often excluding or obscuring fragments of trees, rock, land and sky. Whether or not we can immediately name what we see in a photographic representation, its verisimilitude is always paramount. This recognition promotes twin readings and multiple reference points, leading the viewer to both accept and question the space or place of the image and its multiple meanings.

In an effort to maintain an emphasis upon the relentless flux of our temporal continuum, I combine multi-channel video works with photographs presented as pairs or multiples. In contrast to a singular perception, the simultaneity inherent to experience is accentuated through the use of these viewing strategies that deliberately press together stasis and movement as both captured and reactivated throughout the imagery. Stressing the cognitive shifts between now and then/here and there, articulates the necessary duration of present experience, suggesting that "your perception, however instantaneous, consists in an incalculable multitude of remembered elements; and in truth, every perception is already a memory" (Henri Bergson).

This project acknowledges the Aboriginal Traditional Owners of Victoria.


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