The remaking of things and foster care

Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison
NGV commission for Melbourne Now 2023
The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia
Friday 24th March – Sunday 20th August, 2023

Wrote Nicholas Caire (1837–1918) of the Fairy scene at the Landslip, Black’s Spur, c. 1878, we have since reprinted on silvered collage shards:
“The music of the gentle zephyrs playing among the great giant gums, combined with bird sonnets and other multifarious sounds of animal and insect life in the great forest, impressed one vividly with the feeling that we were within the precincts of fairy land. Veritable fairy glades, the windy fern-bound, and the innumerable fern gullies … is calculated to give the visitor, on his first impression a feeling of ecstatic bewilderment.”[i]

And “ecstatic bewilderment” upon “first impression”, and lasting, very much suited this final stage of The remaking of things.

Printed upon silver paper with an adhesive backing, Caire’s Fairy scene is the last piece of the puzzle. Forty-two pieces, in total, will flicker in the forest, together with fragments from a gelatin bromide glass plate negative of Condon's Gully, Healesville (c. 1903–1910).

But before they could be delivered to the gallery, each mirrored silhouette was released from the printed page and given a gentle smooth around its laser-cut edges with a Teflon bone folder. It was then numbered on the reverse side, as per our detailed map, and packed between sheets of tissue paper, as you can see in the images below. And once more, looking below, it is enjoyable to see that these process images sit in harmony with those of the wildlife currently in our care. Myrtle and Poppy, the Brushtail possum pair; Esme, the littlest, out-of-season Grey-headed flying fox pup; Tiny Timmy and Oscar, two adult male rescues, from netting entanglement in Essendon and a courtyard entrapment in Richmond respectively; Albert, Errol, Iggy and Soot, four pups who have graduated from Bat Rescue Bayside crèche to the Soft Release Enclosure at Yarra Bend, they could all clamber into our collage, The remaking of things, should they choose, and find themselves a branch, some nectar, an unoccupied hollow to curl within. All of which is as we’d hoped it would be.

It’s a few more sleeps yet until we see our collage installed in the gallery, and a few more and then some until the exhibition opens, but those of you who might be near to the University of West England (UWE) can scale a mountain and head to the library to see The Mountains Are Calling…. Our artists’ books, A Hemline of Sky Through Smoke, A Hemline of Forest Through Smoke, and A Hemline of Water Through Smoke (2020) are included in “a selection of 90 artists’ books, publications and small printed works by members of LAND2 and from the archives at the Centre for Print Research” in conjunction with a “Bookarts at UWE / LAND2 symposium in Bristol discussing environmental themes including water quality, land degradation, pollution and damage to the landscape, interventions and ideas”.

The Mountains Are Calling…
An exhibition hosted by Bower Ashton Library, UWE, Bristol, UK
Friday 3rd March – Monday 17th April, 2023
Bower Ashton Library
UWE Bristol, City Campus at Bower Ashton, Kennel Lodge Road, Bristol BS3 2JT

(Download the full pdf list of artefacts in the exhibition.)

Climb into ‘Framing Nicholas Caire, Fairy scene at the Landslip, Black’s Spur c. 1878’ by Isobel Crombie, Angeletta Leggio & Holly McGowan-Jackson, in the NGV’s Art Journal 42, from the 24th April, 2014.

[i] Nicholas Caire & J. W. Lindt, Companion Guide to Healesville, Black’s Spur, Narbethong, Marysville, Mt Donnabuang, Ben Cairn and The Taggerty, Melbourne, 1904, pp. 34–5.

Image credit: Nicholas Caire, Fairy scene at the Landslip, Blacks' Spur, c. 1878, collodian glass plate negative (which features in our collage The remaking of things, 2023)