INGRESS:EGRESS
A series of participatory walks in collaboration with Penny Sadubin
Fire:Ground (Kangaroo Valley) Wonder and Dread, Shoalhaven Regional Gallery, December 2020 The first series of walks take place through the flood and fire affected landscapes of the Shoalhaven, the areas selected represent an entry, exit or intersection of locations impacted by the 2019/20 fire and flood within the Shoalhaven. Fire:Ground allows for slow contemplation after devastation, the gesture of walking in silence allows for passage through the landscape to acknowledgement, observe and an opportunity to tread lightly through the natural and be equal. |
pennysadubin.com
Ingress:Egress uses walking as a social practice, concerned with direct and immediate interaction with the landscape. Ingress:Egress explores the ways diverse opportunities take art practice outside of the gallery context, an active gesture within contemporary art practice into the everyday with limited impact on the natural world. Community members are be invited to participate and walk alongside the artists and share in their practice. Penny and Leanne take time at the end of each walk to document their experience, thoughts and emotions, this may include but not limited to writing, sketching, photographs or recordings. Community members are invited to participate in this documentation process. The artists also end each walk with an opportunity to share dialogue in conversation with them and each other, sharing food and the diverse knowledge and experiences of the place, held within the group on the day. 
|
|
Fire:Ground participant responses Fire:Ground response poem Jennifer Alcorn There is a certain sense of loss Here in this foreign land. Here I am the outsider, the foreigner As I sit, gazing once again At devastation. First Pinery – sudden, fierce, fast And I away from home – locked out The Highway closed. Driving at last through unknown landscapes Black paddocks, vast strange views, Clouds of ash, burnt out homes, I’m anxious But find at the last moment The fire turned away, Our valley safe, our home untouched There is a certain sense of guilt. Then my heartland, the Island And I, long gone, not there To share, to care for friends With lives destroyed To live with them Through fear and loss. There is a certain sense of grief. Now here, strange vistas of vast forests, Mountains, deep valleys. And all a blackened landscape Black sticks of trees Black ash on stone Black distance, endlessly repeating itself All around us. And I, the foreigner, in a foreign land Again untouched, unharmed Gaze at such destruction – There is a certain sense of ending. Just to explain a bit: The South Australian Pinery fire of November 2014 is seared into the minds of the rural populations of the lower and mid North. Started by an old battery on a hot day, it suddenly became a monster with a wind change to a hot north wind of gale force – changing the fire front from a two kilometer wide front to a mega-fire with a front over 210 kilometers wide. The fire burnt over 84,000 hectares within 4 hours, at its height it was travelling at 804 acres burnt per minute. Early November all of this cropping country is heavy with grain crops, the hay, cut baled and shedded all burnt, the crops still on the ground all went too along with wind breaks, roadside vegetation and over 90 homes. 2 people lost their lives, and thousands of sheep and cattle. Wildlife is not abundant in the area so it is presumed that the ones there were lost made little impact on the species numbers. I was in Adelaide on that day – attending meetings and with tickets to a concert that night. My husband was working away from home, so the house was locked up, the dogs in the yard. As the warnings started to come through there was nothing I could do – to try and return home was too dangerous. It was simply a matter of waiting and waiting. Kangaroo Island was home for 25 years – where the children grew up and where many close friends still live. As a regional, farming community fires are not uncommon. The western end – the national parks burn at semi-regular intervals, farming fires happen and tear across a section of land before being contained. The fire that occurred on Kangaroo Island during the Black Summer of 2019/2020 was more than anything in recorded history. Half or the island was burnt and the unique wildlife was devastated. It impacted so many people known to me, loved by me. It tore through farms and homes destroying livelihoods and livestock that in some cases are irreplaceable. It left a shattered community that had lost so much including so many precious memories Having left the Island 20 years ago, the devastation unfolded through online news and phone calls to friends where possible. Again, all I could do was wait. Jennifer Alcorn |
Photo credit: Anne Richmond
Jennifer Alcorn, 2020
Jennifer Alcorn, 2020
Jennifer Alcorn, 2020
Jennifer Alcorn, 2020
Jennifer Alcorn, 2020
|
|
Penny Sadubin recorded cicada's during FIRE:GROUND, 2020
|
A snippet of conversation between FIRE:GROUND participants
|
Anne Richmond, 2020
