Attrition Bay

Gough, Julie (2010) Attrition Bay. [Creative Work]

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Abstract

A group of contemporary artists were invited to respond to the social, cultural and environmental history of Botany Bay by immersing themselves directly in the site during an artist residency. Their responses illustrate the shining terrain between their imaginings of the site and their actual physical experience of Botany Bay as a location.

Research Statement

Research Background Botany Bay is unfixed, incomplete and unstable. It shifts according to the view that presents itself at any give time. Everything here is momentary, a mirage that promises some essence of itself that never fully arrives. The tidal mangrove swamps that permeate the Bay best show this rhythmic absence and presence. With the lack of a ferry today joining La Perouse with Kurnell the Bay has been demarcated into different shires: Botany Bay and Sutherland. The Sutherland Shire is the Botany Bay of Cook’s arrival. Here was the balladic start and end of things as they once were for local people and those incoming. The Bay is almost fictional, the point from which the ripple of ‘arrival’ emanated across the continent, sparing no-one.
Research Contribution ATTRITION BAY reflects on the littering, removing, altering and selling off of this place. I struggle to make my way here – between and around rubbish, smelt or seen, subsurface or sky – thwarted by instructional signs. One even orders me NOT TO COLLECT. This resulted in a journey to gather refuse, placing it within vessels heralding the visage of Captain Cook – the domestic and commercial Shire wheelie bins.
Research Significance Many observations survive from the late 1700s.They reveal the gap between cultures still evident today. Most telling is the lack of understanding by newcomers of interconnections between all things: the material, social, spiritual, human, animal. It is this gap that leaves the Bay today gathering rubbish, washed in and thrown out, its system in disconnect.
Item ID: 19938
Item Type: Creative Work
Media of Output: 16:9 digital video (in conjunction with John A. Douglas), steel, kangaroo skin, sand, mixed media: variable dimensions
Keywords: Indigenous, Aboriginal, Australia, mixed-media, cross-cultural, colonisation, contemporary, exhibition
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Additional Information:

Attrition Bay was shown in an exhibition titled Shifting Sands: Botany Bay today at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, 21 August - 10 October 2010.

Date Deposited: 13 Feb 2012 03:51
FoR Codes: 19 STUDIES IN CREATIVE ARTS AND WRITING > 1905 Visual Arts and Crafts > 190504 Performance and Installation Art @ 100%
SEO Codes: 95 CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING > 9501 Arts and Leisure > 950104 The Creative Arts (incl. Graphics and Craft) @ 100%
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