(Fabric)ations

In April and May this year, life between buildings will be setting up temporary home as artists in residence at ‘living arts centre’ Bundanon, perched over the Shoalhaven River on the NSW South Coast. Our time will be dedicated to unearthing the rich creative potential of the site, bequeathed to the Australian people by one of our most treasured artists, the late Arthur Boyd. Perhaps 'unearthing' isn't the clearest way of putting it, for the conversations we've had about our project have suggested that while it will be driven in many ways by our creative response to the environment and its past, our work will not necessarily 'reflect' the Bundanon that people may think they know.

Although it will be very much immersed in the natural and built environment of Bundanon, one of the main facets of this site-specific project we've talked about is the site's history. Now there’s a safe place to work - it’s happened, it’s there to be dug up; it’s straightforward documented fact. A cursory read of this and that and we’re set to roll. Except...

I’m much more comfortable with the notion of ‘histories’, and from preliminary conversations over the weekend retreat just held in Blackheath in the Blue Mountains, there’s a sense in the life between buildings camp that there’s a shared interest in exploring the endless potential opened up by this notion. Rhiannon's idea of 'interventions' snowballed into all sorts of ideas being thrown about - some achievable, some likely to fall by the wayside - of how the different histories could be brought to life.

In our art as in our life, it seems we are all endeavouring to open up new possibilities, to rethink ways of seeing and creating. The challenges we set ourselves involve contesting received logics, narratives, histories; spoon-fed stories of easily digestible and non-contradictory factlets. That’s not to say we don’t all love our snippets and stories, the process of learning and understanding, it’s more to do with the grain of salt we each tend to carry in our pockets everywhere we go.

Our first major project together, a site-specific creative response based on Bundanon and its multi-layered recent past (working homestead, Boyd family residence, bequeathed arts retreat), is an opportunity to see where this approach can take us. Initial instincts may be to take the spoonfeeding, to respond in a way that seamlessly incorporates the ‘known’ Bundanon, but far more exciting is the potential for intervening on behalf of the overlooked, the unremembered, the never allowed.

A shorthand term for our approach to exploring such mythologies might be ‘fabrications'. The notion of place and history is so loaded, where is one to begin? The fabric of history will become, in our project, a fabricated history. By blurring the boundaries of the known and the unknown, the likely and unlikely - the possible and impossible – it’s likely to pose as many questions as it does answers. But therein lies the appeal, for we’re each interested in opening up rather than closing off, inviting rather than imposing - asking rather than telling.

Along the way, the very notion of creativity is likely to be brought into question. Does one create something if simply trading upon a pre-packaged past? Or does there need to more, an intervention into that past, an insertion of a new ‘something’ that might owe its taste or texture or sense to a past, but be equally indebted to the now, to a spontaneous eruption of a creative spirit that can’t be contained within the parameters of the pre-existing, ‘known’ past to which it might refer.

By fabricating, our intention is not to somehow elevate the reimagining over any existing, dominant narrative. Its purpose is to highlight the tenuous relation a story has in the first place to a transient ‘truth’. It’s a way to get inside the mythology built around a location such as Bundanon, peer beneath the mysterious aura of a site that played such an important role in the later life of one of our most venerated artists.

Our discussions about what was drawing us to the project, what possible means we may have of providing a meaningful site specific study of Bundaon, kept slipping into questions of time’s inexorable passage; the steady march of the future advancing on the present and outflanking the past, such that the mutability of time rendered impossible the notion of capturing forever an essence or truth claim that could somehow exist as an artefact outside of time/space/place.

Faced with such a slippery substance, the options were to pretend it wasn’t an issue, taking the usual path and pushing such concerns to one side, or to tackle them head on and try to beat them at their own game.

This very concept of contested histories, clashing perspectives and the erosion of a truth when seen through the prism of time, were in ample evidence over our weekend brainstorming session. By Sunday, the interpretations of what had taken place and been agreed upon the day prior were as colourfully varied as they were hotly debated. There were five recollections each struggling to be heard, but coming up against disparate and contradictory ‘histories’ of the day. It was exhausting and not exactly easy, but at the very least such friction illustrated everything we had been discussing.

In the same way, the parallel stories and histories we intend to develop through our Bundanon project are likely to slip in and out of safe ground, to allow some footholds while asking for the occasional leap of faith. Suspension of disbelief is, perhaps, the first step towards learning. Our aim is to lead participants on just such a learning experience into the unknown, albeit one in which we firmly recommend the odd grain of salt be brought for the ride.

-Benjamin