Daniel Peltz, When we dig, things come up (2013-14)
Rosie Halsmith
Artist: Daniel Peltz Work: When we dig, things come up (2013-14) Location: Tom Price, Western Australia
When we dig, things come up explores the act of mining. It arose from Peltz’ sense that his role as a U.S. American artist in residence in a Western Australian town founded on U.S. American ambition and greed was something of a re-enactment. In response to this situation, Peltz ‘mined’ a series of narrative fragments from and about Tom Price — the US businessman, the former mountain and the present-day purpose-built mining town and open-pit iron ore mine. ‘I extracted material everywhere I went’, says Peltz, ‘in conversations, workshops, solitary walks, meditations and dreams, applying the same minimum standards used in the mining industry [65 per cent purity] to the narrative fragments I extracted’. The selected fragments were then shipped to a Chinese opera company and a landscape painter, following the same trade routes as the mined iron ore. These skilled artists ‘refined’ the narrative fragments and returned a Beijing opera for public exhibition in the township of Tom Price, and a series of landscape paintings for display in the Western Australian Museum.