Tender Places builds conversation with, in and through place. I create research artefacts during field work to document, translate and disseminate the research with, to and through place.
Postcards are the project’s first physical research arteacts. Created from photographs and field notes, they are mailed to a network of creative peers in Australia and beyond.
The postcard is presented as a queering material medium; an appropriated artefact of outsider privilege, a public/private artwork for an audience of one, a material that crosses political and geographical borders to link places and people through space and time.
Ilparpa Claypans, Arrernte Land
These postcards were created on a series of field visits in the Alhwerrpe Mpepe/Autumn of 2019. On each visit to the claypans I would walk with a different reading, many of them works by Deborah Bird Rose, translating the ideas with/in place through my body. These postcards were written at the conclusion of each walk and are reflection of the physical and intellectual journey.
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I drive out to the claypans two days after the rains to catch them before they go down. When I first moved to town, a rain like this would fill them for months. Now, with so much driving over, the clay is worn thin and they drain within days. I want to blame other people for this, but like Deborah Bird Rose says, we are all hero, victim and villain. Although in this case I’m not sure what being a hero for this place would look like. The flies have returned after a summer of heatwaves and drought. The late rains return humidity and heat where we through we had made the switch to winter doonas and freezing nights. Everything is unpredictable, just like the election result, and just like what has happened here I want to blame it on someone else. I wish I could leave you with something graceful, like blame doesn’t change what has happened, and then a 4WD splashes past me, and my clarity turns to rage. Written at the Ilparpa Claypans, Arrernte land, 21st May, 2019 Sent to Paula Faraco, Berlin, Germany
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I went looking for hope at the clay pans this morning, because as MK Turner says, country is always there, underneath, and as Deborah Bird Rose says, there is love, as well as violence. And so I carried these two ideas with me as I walked in freezing winds. Past claypans which are mud and old car parts, past tracks cut into the earth, over plants. Past old pots and asthma puffers and discarded underwear, until I came upon a place where I hoped that hope would be. And it was. There on the mounds where Landcare had cleared back the buffle weed, Kangaroo grass had sprouted. It’s a common species that grows longer seeds inland so they can travel further to take root. It produces more seed in dry times. It seems adaptive to climate change. Hope can be small, and hard to recognise, it could be easier to overlook resilience when surrounded by what is being trashed. It can be hard to see past the grief but there is beauty still, and the humble work of not abandoning is an expression of love. Written at the Ilparpa Claypans, Arrernte land, 4th June 2019 Sent to Shannyn Palmer, Bywong, New South Wales, Australia
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The first thing you see are the tyre ruts, eating into the clay, and tearing up the base of the 12 interconnected claypans that hold water here. They are broken in ways I do not understand. I only know they don’t hold water like they used to. The delicate meniscus of mud separates and reforms, cracking where it no longer holds water. There is so much grief here. It seems like every time I come there is more destruction. I’ve started looking for hope on my visits and this morning I seek out native grasses regrowing on a cleared mound. On my way over I find myself stopping suddenly at tracks. Emu tracks. I’ve never seen them here. I photograph them, double check on google, message them (photographs) excitedly to friends. Sitting on the hill near the new native grass returning, I reflect on the resilience of life. The mud, the grass, the Emu, keep doing the business of life. How do we support this business of living? How we continue to turn towards life? How to honor the small struggles of others in a way that births humble, tangible actions of hope? All of this is resistance to the narrative of foregoness. Written at the Ilparpa Claypans, Arrernte land, 14th June, 2019 Sent to Dougald Hine, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom
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The depths of the tracks takes me by surprise – is this where I lay in the dirt in summer? I am walking with assemblage theory and unexpectedly find myself giving way to sensation; wandering of the road onto 4WD tracks to experience the crunch of mud beneath my feet. I sway away from the fence. It creeps me out down here. I consider situatedness in assemblage, how the constellations we make depend on what we can see, and what we value. Dark space is not empty. How is place a site of assemblage? Different alignments joined together by different bodies, these bodies overlapping and illuminating and obscuring each other, signalling in a multiplicity of ways Written at the Ilparpa Claypans, Arrernte land, 23 June, 2019 Sent to Bram Arnold, Cownwall, United Kingdom
