when we dig, things come up2013-15
Tom Price, Western Australia
Commissioned by Spaced for their 2015 biennial, Future Recall, this project emanates from a two-year investigation of the iron-ore mining, company-town of Tom Price in Western Australia. The project began from a sense that my role, as an American artist-in-residence, in a Western Australian town founded on American ambition and greed, was something of a re-enactment. In response to this situation, I developed a writing/mining practice to parallel the other resource extraction activities conducted in the region. This involved mining a series of narrative fragments, from and about “Tom Price”: the U.S. businessman, the former mountain and the present day purpose-built mining town and open-pit, iron-ore mine. I extracted material everywhere I went, in conversations, workshops, solitary walks, meditations and dreams. I then graded the fragments, applying the same minimum quality standards used in the mining industry [65% purity] to the narrative fragments I extracted. The selected, graded fragments of text were then shipped to a Chinese opera company and a landscape painter, following the same trade routes as the iron-ore. These skilled artists refined the narrative fragments and sent back a Peking Opera, for public exhibition in the town of Tom Price, and a series of Chinese landscape paintings, for display in the Western Australia Museum.
video sample from the opera: The Journey of Mount Nameless
-> Artlink article discussing the project