'Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.'
Rainer Maria Rilke in letter dated February 17, 1903, Paris reproduced in Letters to a Young Poet, First Vintage Books Edition, 1986.

With a choice of any of the 80 visual artists in the port city, June Moorhouse selected eight with whom she feels a personal connection. ‘Artistic expression of the experience of Fremantle’ was her request to the eight artists.

To build a show around an experience of place is a terribly old-fashioned concept. And yet like all fashions, things get recycled and become relevant again. 101 years later and I’m citing Rilke. Against the current curatorial fashion, Moorhouse has not made a selection from existing artwork but commissioned new works to a theme.

What struck me when visiting the eight artists to discuss their works-in-progress was their complete enthusiasm for the project and the easiness with which they were able to make work for this exhibition. Creative-blocks melted. In fact it is as if Moorhouse has given each of them the perfect rationale for their pet-project or magnum opus.

What is even more curious is that while they are all well and truly established mid-late career artists, their life-styles and art practices have little in common. And yet thematically, in their works-in-progress there is so much synergy I can imagine the exhibition as a giant, looping strand of DNA.

In preparing this essay it struck me that these eight are largely self-made artists. None has had a consistent champion or sole patron relentlessly promoting their cause. They have all had to drive a career, largely by themselves and persist against the odds.

Curious, that with endless possibilities, many of the artists have chosen to communicate their experience of walking in the port city. But then most guide books will tell you that walking is the best way to get to know a place. Almost all the artists have a regular walk of choice and for others the route is determined by practical activities like taking the kids to school.

Trevor Richards intends to video his walk to the South Mole and back, put it on an endless loop. He likens his walk to meditation. Theo Koning is taking inspiration from his coastal rambles and the changing nature of sites visited repeatedly. It is the magic within an ordinary experience he wishes to communicate. Jane Whiteley is transforming the everyday experience of walking her daughters to Lance Holt School in Fremantle into a textile map that will spread its composite of fabric arms and legs across the floor and up the wall of the Moores Building Gallery. Blue silk arms, sky and water; embracing the port. Grounded rust coloured arms embracing the earth and waiting for others to share the path. Whiteley’s work points to the local learning that the Lance Holt children have undertaken, although this installation is about her experience as a parent and she is clear that she is not trying to speak for the children. Meanwhile, Holly Story wants to share her walk along South Beach’s cycle track and her ritual of examining the weeds.

The artists’ accounts of their walking experiences and meanings have me imagining all the ‘private’ regular walks winding around us. The man that speaks loudly to his friend as they puff up the hill past my bedroom window every morning is only one of many with a walk routine. Being newly self-employed, my new found freedom is symbolised to myself by extending the territory of my regular walk.

What do artists notice on a walk? Many commented on how much they enjoy the un-constructed, random aspects of the landscape, or the contrast between the formally landscaped parts and the ugly-beauty of the abandoned parts. Several are inspired by the rubbish strewn edges of the port, where tough dune plants exist. Theo Koning and Megan Kirwan-Ward would like their collaborative work to get at the essence of both the increasingly ordered, formally landscaped gardens around us and the beauty in the random uncultivated bits.

Like an obsessive bower bird, for more than 5 years, Koning has been collecting rubbish – rusty nails, broken glass, bones etcetera - in the lane behind his home-studio and sorting them into aesthetic groupings. His artistic sensibility demands order and a paring back. On the other hand, Kirwan-Ward’s aesthetic is opulent characterised by hand-sewn details and rich dyes. Their aesthetic coupling for this show demonstrates a new receptiveness to a collaborative, spontaneous way of working.

All the artworks in this show inevitably reflect and develop each artist’s oeuvre in significant ways. In this way all the artworks are self-referential but they all make deliberate reference to a world beyond their immediate surface. For instance, lurking behind Story’s fascination with weeds, like the non-Indigenous fennel, is a history of immigration, survival and persistence.

Having arrived in Fremantle from England in 1988, Jane Whiteley has a heightened awareness of the influence of the immigrant population. It is also an area that the school children have been studying and tucked in the work people will recognise the spoon and fork from an Italian café. For Whiteley, cloth is metaphor. The Moreton Bay figs imprinted into her cloth pathway embody and mirror the experience of squelching over them on her walks. The figs evolve into dice, alluding to fate, children’s board games and the chance by which some of us end up here.

The layers in the plywood he uses remind Bevan Honey of the different cultures that co-exist in Fremantle. He notes that his routing is comparable to the actions of white ants and the process of colonisation. The complexity of the lines in these routed pieces contrast with the simpler charcoal drawing inspired by the roof trusses in his shed/studio. Both ‘drawings’ connect us with others beyond their frame. We are reminded of our complex social make-up on a grand scale and of all the creative human activity occurring in back-sheds and under roofs everywhere.

Frank Morris used to be a member of the Fremantle Racing Pigeon Club – a favourite sport in the past of Fremantle’s working men and women. The Club finally closed its doors last year after the last pigeon fanciers moved away to outer suburbs that were more sympathetic to backyard cooing. Along with the sights, sounds and excitement the birds provided, Morris mourns the people and the internal communal function that this Club, and others like it, fulfilled.

Not all the artwork is contained within the Moores Building. Through his work with the Australian Centre for Concrete Art, Trevor Richards is accustomed to intervening in Fremantle’s public spaces. This show has given him the opportunity to reinvigorate a project he commenced in March 2003. There is more than a gesture towards ritual in this work. As a surprise visual treat for those who walk his walk, Richards will paint the inside of empty, locked bunkers on the mole. For some years now, Richards has limited his palette to four colours, two of which will feature in the bunk house interiors. When the show is over, in accordance with the conditions allowing him to undertake this project, the artist has agreed to return these bunkers to their original colour.

With the connection to Lance Holt School, Jane Whiteley’s work also extends beyond the Gallery. While cloth is Whiteley’s medium, she shows me line drawings, done with her eyes closed, done over and over, as she traces mental maps of her childhood home and the walks embedded in memory.

Holly Story’s sea-scape lead prints recycle a friend’s much loved elegant dress. The textured fabric is folded and pressed to image the unruliness of the sea. Printmaking is always about remaking, even more so in this case where the process of the lead prints intentionally re-enacts the early history of nature printing.

Brian McKay likes to quote Matisse’s ‘to take away is to add’. He is known for his minimal geometric abstracts in aluminium. The most senior of this group of artists, McKay is perhaps the artist who has made the biggest shift in his artwork to accommodate the theme of this show. He is most adamant on the importance of June Moorhouse’s research. As always with McKay, the works concern themselves with optics, but for this new series, made specially for this show, recognisable shapes appear: sails and boats. Depending on the light and where you stand, the shading of these forms constantly alters. The surface tricks us in other ways. With its metallic glow it looks like a hardy material to work with. It is surprising to learn that the metallic surface is delicate. McKay calls it a grubby medium. The artist has to use white cotton gloves to work it and epoxy resins to preserve it.

As we cannot fail to recognise the sail in McKay’s aluminium panel, not so long ago, a particular Fremantle audience would have been able to recognise one of Frank Bunter’s famous Fremantle Pigeons – the ‘Bunter 100’s’ from a picture. Frank Morris alludes to this period by giving us his version of the first and last pigeon champions documented by the club. It is a stark reminder of the fact that audiences for artworks change and therefore the meaning of an image can change. What we actually see changes.

Homing pigeons haven’t returned to Fremantle as a popular recreational activity. Cycles occur, things are repeated, but nothing stays exactly the same. All the artists deeply appreciate the title of this show Shifting Ground. It can address the surface qualities of their artworks, their ambitions for their artwork and the instability of all they are working with. And yet they persist moving around on shifting ground. The theme of this show has provided a home for some of their wanderings.

Notes:
Statistics on numbers of artists in Fremantle are from ArtSource. All quotes from artists and the curator are from individual meetings with this writer in September 2004 while the artworks were in progress.