Curiosities: Some reflections about the enjoyable and rewarding collaboration between myself and Veronica Nicholson, and its outcomes.

 

Out of the connection set up, and the ongoing communication about making an exhibitable contribution to the YAK YAK project, some “things” have become manifest that mark the place we have reached.

 

You will see them in the display cases.

 

They trace the path of their becoming in reverse. They do not document the process of collaboration, but are only possible because of it. So any retrospective recording of their coming to this place in Swan Hill, is in itself a creative undertaking, of selection, emphasis and fiction.

 

These objects are at the same time places and connectors; places on cognitive maps of significances, and places represented by locations on a physical map.

 

Each marker, or thing displayed, is both a stoppage and a portal. It is determined by locality and rurality and evokes, or describes, lived experience on the farm, while at the same time linking immaterially to the individual artist’s universe of significance, association and imagination.

 

These things might be evocative, enigmatic, practical or puzzling. Each one, whether precious or worthless in itself, can carry endless signification. The purpose of the objects displayed, is to give access to awareness and knowledge, not to be art objects.

 

So the improvised farm tool or repurposed tractor part held together with binder twine, can be not only representative of the creativity and ingenuity of farmers, but can be super-charged with significance by people wanting to communicate the human values, and expanded potential of consciousness, possible through “rural” experience.

 

Each thing, while eliciting its own meaning for those encountering it, is linked via QR code to web-based content.  It becomes the meeting place for a person’s immense depth of personal memory, association and feeling, and the vast extent of interlinked websites of immaterial information, mediated by an artist on a farm.

 

So the project is a work in progress, perhaps forever so.