Mullewa residency - 2014-5 — Valdene Diprose

Mullewa residency - 2014-5

A collaboration between Mullewa Arts Development (MAD) and small places in and around Mullewa …

Space - place

Marco Marcon suggests that there is a strong divide between space and place in small rural communities.[1] In Australia in particular, small places of human settlement are often isolated by immense, uninhabited spaces. Australian landscape art has often focused on and celebrated these macro spaces rather than the micro environments – the small places where people live.

Mullewa is a good example of a small place situated between vast spaces. in 2014-5 It was an anxious community, aware that its long term viability is bound up in the fertility of the soil and the annual rainfall.

Participants in the project were asked to identify a small, significant site in or around Mullewa and write a narrative about that place, linking the ideas of identity-place-water that are so bound up in the psyche of Mullewa.

Each participant was given a metre of canvas and a diary to record their interactions with their chosen place over time. Sites included a town yard, a particular location on a farm and a heritage site that has historical/spiritual significance. The interactions varied – canvas was sometimes just laid in the space, while other times it was stained and rubbed. All participants used water, drawing on the notion that it is the lifeblood and key to Mullewa’s survival.[2]

[1] Marco Marcon, ed. From Space to Place(Perth: International Art Space Kellerberrin Australia (IASKA), 2005). 3, 6-7.

[2] MAD’s photographic projects attest to Mullewa’s concern with water.

Julie Freeman

Gnamma Hole, (2015), 1000 x 1000 mm, frottage, dirt and algae on canvas

I came to Mullewa twenty years ago as a graduate teacher, found my farmer and married him. Now we have two adolescent daughters who are away at boarding school and I am retired from teaching. Our home farm is thirty kilometres south of Mullewa as you head to Mingenew.

I chose to explore the gnamma hole on our property; I’ve learnt a lot abocanvs to stop evaporation, and just know where these sources of water were. Ours is right out in the middle of a wheat paddock so if you didn’t know it was there you wouldn’t find it; you’d never accidentally stumble across it. You cannot see it from the road. Even walking through the paddock you don’t know it is there until you are right on top of it.

The site must be important to me because it keeps playing on my mind. I can’t help thinking it’s an indication that people have been here for a very long time. And the people who were here and used that gnamma hole as a source of water – nobody knows who they were and nobody will ever know who they were. They got lost in time. It reminds me that in a couple for hundreds years’ time nobody will know who I was either. And nobody will remember who we were. And who knows there may not even be a farm here. It may all have reverted back to bush by then so it reminds me that although people have always been here we do not actually own this place. And we don’t really matter if that makes sense. It is all very ephemeral. And that is not a bad thing. It stops you taking yourself seriously. And in some ways it takes the pressure off you. It is not really all going to matter in a hundred years’ time as long as you do no harm while you are here. That’s what I think about when I am sitting out there rubbing the rock. There would have been women sitting out there … a thousand years ago, maybe not rubbing the rock, maybe taking water out of the hole, maybe cleaning it or maybe doing something with their family. And I am just another link in this very long chain.

(Thanks go to Julie Freeman who generously gave permission for her text and the following images to feature on the website.)

Valdene Diprose

The Waterfalls, (2015), 2000 x 1000 mm, frottage, dirt and rock fragments on canvas

In childhood, my farming family were constantly anxious, scanning the horizon, willing rain. Only ccasionally, there was the worrying question, ‘Will it stop?’ Once, I remember husbanding newborn lambs in chill driving rain, and having to stop mid-paddock, several times to empty overflowing waterlogged rubber boots.

Water is still a mecca that brings both joy and disquiet. On arrival in Mullewa, I was drawn to the the spectacular rocks at the Waterfalls, with their white stripes of quartz squeezed into bold patterns between hard red sandstone. As a transient visitor, it seemed appropriate to make work in a tourist destination that is also a much-loved place for the locals.

It is easy to see that the Waterfalls is, at times, a place of drama. Its history is on show in the uprooted trees and the mud washed rocks. On the last day of July working at the site, after substantial rain, I was startled to witness the river’s headwaters surge across the rocky floodplain, only to find, on the following day, the water had ebbed away.