Julia Davis, Headspace (Lake Brown), 2010
Artist: Julia Davis
Work: Headspace (Lake Brown) 2010
Partner: Shire of Mukinbudin
Location: Mukinbudin, Western Australia
In 2010 Sydney artist, Julia Davis, researched and developed a series of artworks, both site-specific and documentary, in response to the history, landscape and people of the small town of Mukinbudin.
Davis' poetic, site-specific works were accompanied by Levelled Ground, an exhibition held at the old Mukinbudin Railway Station. The exhibition comprised a gold-leaf wall schematic that visually represented digital information contained within recorded interviews between the artist and four local people no longer able to live on their farms. A series of photographic portraits were also exhibited, documenting these individuals on the farms they had been forced to leave behind.
During her residency Davis also developed In Transit, an interactive video piece that consists of a sequence of motion-activated images that momentarily appear and disappear according to the movements of the audience. The work presents the range of gestures of acknowledgment that Mukinbudin locals make to one another when passing by in their cars and trucks; a compendium that reveals the social codes of a close-knit community.
