nien schwarz
earth matters
12 september - 12 october 08
- press release
- ric spencer, putting us on the spot the west australian, 3 october 2008
Born in the Netherlands, raised in Canada, and settled in Australia since 1994, Nien Schwarz has had a life-long passion for geography and earth sciences.
Accompanying geological mapping expeditions she cooked her way across the Canadian arctic between 1981-1992. Since 1994 she has assisted with Australian based geological field expeditions. For fifteen years her arts practice has explored our collective dependence on natural resources - particularly minerals, water, and agricultural products - and the global quest to meet rising demand.
Nien's work is a continual reflection of her relationships to the ground beneath our feet. In Promised Land, a feature of the 2001 Perth International Arts Festival, she created 800 hand-made shopping bags each one individually folded from a single and different topographic map sheet of Australia. Collectively these bags were arranged on long steel shelves reminiscent of a library or retail display. Her 2006 exhibition, Over my shoulder, included extensive wall and floor surfaces 'tiled' in air reconnaissance photos of Western Australia. This gridded landscape revealed an astounding array of colours and patterns, a glaring lack of surface water, widespread grazing practices and decades of criss-crossing vehicle tracks. In this latest exhibition, Earth Matters, Nien has used the inside circumference of a roll of flagging tape as a metaphor for lenses, drill bits, mine shafts,bores, and wells.
The choice of materials is considered carefully in relation to the context of the works. Most of the wall pieces are painted or prepared on doors, which for Nien allude to thresholds between domestic desires and the outside world. Her paints are of the earth; being pure unmixed colours collected directly from drill rigs, mines, and bores across Australia. The stylised six-petal flower motifs are made using topographic maps printed in the 1970s. Each petal pinpoints a name of a waterhole, well, bore, livestock yard, or mine. It is interesting to note which of these placenames have been carried forth to contemporary GIS software programs and databases such as Google Earth and Geonames. The place names for excavated sites profoundly reflect colonial dreams, European cultural and geographic displacement and tensions associated with indigenous and non-indigenous land ownership issues.
Dr Nien Schwarz 2008
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