Q: How did this collaboration come about?

A: We met while doing our PhDs.  From the beginning, it was clear that there were some interesting similarities in our respective practices. We both created works exploring the history and politics of place with a focus on the environment and the enduring impact of settler-colonialism. We both also utilise performance, photography, film and participatory art methods to explore these themes. However, Wild Country is the first time we have collaborated.

During the COVID-19 lockdowns, Clare found herself missing the Ovens River – the river of her childhood – so she embarked on a large-scale research project about its social, political and ecological history. Heather also has a long-term connection to the Ovens as her family meets there every couple of years to holiday and in 2017 she developed a work that explored the impact of mining on the river called Loss/Gain. Consequently, when Clare shared her research with Heather a collaboration was born and Wangaratta Art Gallery (located on the Ovens River) was excited to support our proposal, so we began working together.

Q: Can you describe how print has informed this project?

A: Heather is a trained printmaker so print shapes the way she thinks about making art and the work itself.  While not a printmaker, Clare’s work has often utilised archives – written and photographic – so is in conversation with printed matter, she also has a history of digital printing on site-specific experimental surfaces.  Consequently, print plays a significant role in the exhibition informing both what was made and the meaning of the work.

Working with Clare’s detailed historical research we developed a series of handmade costumes that unpack the complex ecological history of the river and its worrying future. Screenprinting forms the details of these costumes. Our River Jackets, which are mens’ suit jackets, reference the formal suits of the early landholders, and the contemporary/corporate farm manager. They are lined with screenprinted native grasses.  This screenprinted fabric has been cut into sections and reconstituted which speaks to the way that the discontinuation of Indigenous cultural burning practices, and colonial land use, such as farming and mining, has destroyed humans’ lives, native plants and soil compositions. The modified jackets have numerous pockets, in these we placed native plants that struggle to grow beside the river due to the impact of agriculture but also mining. The screenprinted lining was also dyed a bright yellow which references the catastrophic impact of DDT habitually sprayed on the area’s tobacco fields until 1981. Wearing the jackets we made a series of performance works titled What has been lost and sometimes found where we walked along the river in costume.  As we walked, the plants in our pockets were momentarily reintroduced to the sites they struggle to inhabit.

We also made a series of costumes to explore Mount Buffalo, a key part of the river’s watershed.  These costumes reference the archival photography of Guide Alice who was one of the first settlers to document how settlers engaged recreationally with the mountain. The costume has a comical long calico skirt which also reference the white sails of the First Fleet bringing humans and other invasive species. These white costumes have been dyed in parts referencing the colour of Mount Buffalo’s distinct granite rocks and Heather screenprinted images of alpine lichen over the top. This costume, and the way that we documented it, wrestles with the role of non-Indigenous Australians living on unceded land. In making work about the Australian landscape, or in the Australian landscape, there is always a risk that we recreate colonial dominance over the landscape rather than making room for complex understandings of place and Indigenous sovereignty.  Lichen inexorably changes the chemical weathering of rocks as it excretes various organic acids, particularly oxalic acid, which dissolves minerals. As it does so, over time it creates soil that fosters life in the form of plants, so the screenprinted lichen is metaphorically degrading and dissolving the settler to make way for new forms of life.  We titled this work Flattening the Sublime and scale also plays a key part.  The final work is made up of a large wall-printed decal (3.6m x 2.7m) documenting a Mount Buffalo landscape without us.  Three small framed digital prints (39cm x 26cm) are positioned on top of the decal. The small prints are captured in the same landscape as the decal however, they document us, in the white costume, disappearing into a snowy fog.

One of the prints we are most excited about is a large-format (1m x 2m) digital print of a pine plantation beside the Ovens River that has been printed onto a piece of pine plywood made in the local mill.  The wood grain cuts through the image reminding the viewer of the materiality grown from this site.  Pine plantations are an important part of the region’s economy, growing over land reshaped and damaged by mining. As it is not for human consumption it can also be grown on contaminated sites soaked with DDT and heavy metals.  However, every time it is harvested whole hills and floodplains surrounding the river are clear-felled.  This visually distressing scene clearly articulates the violence of late capitalism but also impacts the Ovens River and tributaries as without the trees latent deposits of heavy metals from mining and DDT wash off the cleared hills and floodplains into the river.

Q: You both have a history of participatory practice – are there any ways that the audience get involved in the work?

A: One of our goals is to document the very diverse social and cultural importance of the Ovens River. To do that we have asked community members to contribute a letter to the river that tells a forgotten history, a memory or an aspiration for the Ovens River.  Several community members including the member for Indi Dr Helen Haines MP contributed a letter. These letters are printed as A1 posters for the exhibition, and we have provided pens and paper so that people visiting the exhibition can add their letter to the gallery wall. Thus far we have received some beautiful contributions that are fascinating, touching, funning and curious.

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Wild Country (Clare McCracken and Heather Hesterman with Andrew Ferris, Scarlet Sykes Hesterman and Xander Reichard) is at Wangaratta Gallery, 56 Ovens Street, until 3 November. https://www.wangarattaartgallery.com.au/Exhibitions/Current-Exhibitions/Wild-Country-Clare-McCracken-and-Heather-Hesterman

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