This evening I unfortunately missed my colleague (and current Walters Prize finalist) Maddie Leach’s talk at Massey about her recent residency undertaken in in the smallish Western Australian city of Mandurah (located about 70 km south of Perth). Maddie has a habit by now of going to relatively isolated locales and circling slowly around their local histories, lived spaces, and quotidian ephemera in order to create a constellation of potential materials from which to work, though in a relatively characteristic “post-studio” manner. Maddie’s weekly blog entries are fascinating reading, highly engaging in their discussions that range from research into meteorites, indigenous-settler relations (including the chilling Pinjarra Massacre that occurred in 1834), events surrounding a local crab festival, local dialect and slang, bike hire, the 1980s pop of The Triffids, regional cultural activity, a miniature version of Ludwig II’s castle crafted by a Bavarian stonemason, and “thrombolites.”
