p/re-occupied and Imbás: a well at the bottom of the sea

Julie Gough, p/re-occupied, 2022.
Trawlwoolway artist Julie Gough follows ancestral rivers and tributaries in the Midlands of Tasmania and the absence of ancestral objects for this project. Gough has 3D printed 100 Tasmanian stone tools held in the Australian Museum collections off-Country, suspended like a shower of black rain. Footage of Gough kayaking along isolated waterways of Paranaple (Mersey river), Panatana creek, Tinamirakuna (Macquarie river) and Lokenermenanya (Clyde river) is a virtual return to Country and Riverways for the tools. The sack of river rocks collected from Paranaple (Mersey river) balance the vessel Gough used to visit these sites of un/return. The stickers of Tasmanian tools are like disturbing avatars and we are left to imagine the possibilities if only the artist was in possession of the tools. Gough is uncovering the glitches in using new technologies to repatriate facsimiles of cultural belongings. Due to Covid-19 lockdowns Gough never got to hold these stone tools handmade by her Old People.

'In boxes in state museums our Country lays by the ton. Our Ancestors’ stone tools were taken, shipped offshore. Their absence wilfully erases evidence of the longest occupation of any place by a people. How can a culture of colonists arrive, new and blind, and believe they can own the living land, its waterways, its creatures, and therefore control time, the future?'—Julie Gough

Clare Milledge, Imbás: a well at the bottom of the sea, 2022.
'The installation Imbás: a well at the bottom of the sea draws on the Story of Sinann, an Old Irish story/dindshenchas about the forming of the river Sinnan/Shannon. In the story, the woman Sinnan, a highly accomplished poet seeks imbás/inspiration. She journeys to a well at the bottom of the sea, surrounded by nine musical, magical hazel trees; there she draws imbás from the well in the form of bubbles released by the resident wise salmon, who chew on the hazelnuts fallen from the trees. This imbás/inspiration, previously jealously guarded by magicians is then released for the benefit of the community and forms the river Sinnan.

The connection between rivers, inspiration, poetry, truth-telling and ecology is explored in this work. Suspended glass paintings evoke the story of Sinann using poetic techniques; nine cauldrons stand in for the nine hazel trees at the well; and research notes appear as text on silk fragments. Music and voices of poets and ecologists are combined in a complex sound work triggered by the depth of the water under the floorboards of Pier 2/3.'—Clare Milledge