Rural Utopias Residency: Ella Sutherland in Margaret River #1
Ella Sutherland is currently working with the community of Margaret River. This residency forms part of one of Spaced’s current programs, Rural Utopias.
Ella is an artist and graphic designer whose work is concerned with the analysis and activation of text and visual language. She investigates systems of reading and navigation within the built environment and printed spaces. Looking at the complexity of graphic language outside of commercial endeavours, she identifies gesture and narrative as elements tied to our interpretation of text and visual language. She employs these elements to coaxe a graphic sensibility to operate in a different register and shift the ‘typical’ readings of spaces and information.
Here, Ella shares an update from Margaret River.
Arriving to Western Australia for the first time on the 11th of March I noticed the light – bright, clear – and a view of the horizon I’m yet to find on my usual side of things. While the west coast of New Zealand is often described as being a bit grim, the wide open spaces of WA seemed at first glance to dissolve any such darkness. Of course, we are under no illusion of what that mine does do, as we have all come to know in the most ferocious of ways.
A drive three hours south took me to the Margaret River. My accommodation, very generously hosted by Salvatore (Sam) and Nigel, was a pair of beautifully restored train carriages effortlessly nestled in the bush. Being my first time living so close to the Australian landscape, the absence of noise, light or other people was a welcome reprieve from my usual apartment-living life.
After months of exchange, I was pleased to be able to finally meet Francesco Geronazzo of Margaret River Printmaking, and Soula Veyradier from Spaced. We talk about life in Margaret River, and start to firm up how best to navigate a three-part workshop series planned to take place in the second week of April. I go to Hamlin Bay and see a stingray the size of a picnic table swirl around a touristic ankle, eat at Pizzica with Nigel and Sam (one of Sam’s numerous building projects), and meet Mick Simpson, a local fabricator who we’re hoping to work with to cut a series of forms in local timber for printing.
My initial proposal for the residency focused on the ways declarative (or, manifesto-type) language has functioned as an aid for the progression of utopian visions. Encompassing the evolution of agricultural techniques, experimental typography and collaborative working methodologies, the visual form of the project would recalibrate archival artefacts as an alphabet. This new font would be constructed in collaboration with local residents over a workshop series, with the hope that it might in turn reflect something of the aspiration of the area. While highly ambitions to condense research, workshops and print production into 6 weeks, it was an exciting prospect to set these parameters in motion and see what happened.
March 17, Soula and her friend Julianne arrive from Perth, we have aperitivo with Nigel, Sam and Francesco, and the next day, meet with Mary a former colleague of Soula’s for a walk along Gnarabup beach. By this time, news of the unfolding COVID-19 crisis was increasing, and it became apparent that my work needed to anticipate a whole new mode of collaboration. A meeting scheduled with the Art & Cultural Committee and my artist talk at the library that afternoon were both cancelled, and instead we met with Kim Rosenfeld, Community Development Officer at the Shire of Augusta Margaret River, to pitch an updated configuration of how the project was able to adapt and continue.
After an impromptu planning session, we proposed the development of a print publication that community participants (nominated by the Shire and via Soula and Francesco’s networks) would be prompted to contribute aspects of their experience of the unfolding situation, and in turn, the notion of a ‘rural utopia’. I would write, design and produce the books over the weekend, and deliver them to the 26 participants over the week starting Monday the 23rd. These would be collected after a period of five days, and each reflection spliced with archival material into a 26-part print series created with Francesco. These prints were to be produced in an edition of two; one for public presentation, and one for each participant. The collection of prints would also be assembled into a single volume alongside the booklets for deposit in the local library.
As supermarkets were emptied, and statisticians calculated exponential growth, my mornings became increasingly full of notifications from Sydney friends in small apartments, The Guardian, my mum, postponed projects, rent. I wondered if I would know that the entire world was scrambling without this digital line. Rural life, with its natural inclination for distance, space, small groups and isolation revealed itself as increasingly ideal.
With the introduction of heightened measures regarding distance, it was decided that the project would need to go online as a precaution. The project was thus revised a third time to host a series of exchanges over email, phone and video which would then be collated into some kind of publishable outcome. I prepared a letter to accompany the booklet:
Dear Participant,
This booklet takes the place of workshop series which, when I arrived to the Margaret River on 12 March, was to take place. In just two weeks, our collective understanding of space, place, contact and survival has changed significantly, and it is with this moment that I would like to ask you to share your experience in a bid to capture some small part of what it is to navigate life at this point.
With an openness to folding in the uncertainty of the moment, I invite you to contribute your experience through the lens of the theme of ‘rural utopias’ over the following pages. Given the day-to-day unpredictability of what we are facing, the process is approached with flexibility, any hurdles we face in arriving to outcomes, with patience.
As outlined in the enclosed letter from IAS, these reflections will be compiled into a publication, and in the spirit of embracing the transition of our once precise timeline into a fluid form, a series of prints.
I thank you for your generosity in responding, and am hopeful that we are able to find a generative space within this space of crisis.
Yours,
Ella Sutherland
Later than afternoon, announcements of restrictions of travel within WA, and significant reductions to domestic flight availability, it was decided that the project be terminated. I phoned Virgin to shift my flight from 22 April, to 27 March, and the staff on the other end asked if I would prefer an aisle or a window seat, to which I replied: whichever is furthest away from anyone else?! Returning to one of the most densely populated suburbs in Australasia, the accessibility to the bustle of city, to people, layers, all suddenly felt irrelevant. The 500 disposable rubber gloves purchased for printmaking with Francesco now bestowed with life-saving abilities; my terror of plastic waste put on pause as plastic pairs went on, went off, and in the bin. I had arrived to a full reconsideration of space: your space, my space, what trace my body – now a weapon – might leave in space.
What is important? Does physicality matter to you? What is it to completely re-imagine the way in which daily life unfolds? Where is the true utopia in which we may live forever in paradise on earth? I caught what may have been one of the last flights back to Sydney from WA. The Perth airport was completely empty when the Virgin attendant informed me that my bag was 5kg over to which I responded with the grace of a petulant child by transferring 3 bottles of organic WA white into my carry on (some things never change). A row each, I wiped down my area with a homemade wet-wipe and arranged my homemade face mask in form or repurposed tea towel for 5 hours of trying not to touch anything.
Perhaps like the experience of waking up this past two weeks, it takes a moment to immediately identify that thing that feels a bit off. I spent five hours drifting in and out of recalling the off-ness, all the way to Sydney where, as Sydney does so well, people were doing as they pleased. The rapidity of the past week left little time to reflect on the fact that the project was not possible, and not just because of the circumstance, but suddenly the entire idea of what it was to make an artwork, to request the attention of others, to invest time and energy into something felt like it needed to be reconfigured. Setting up an artist-run space in Christchurch during the 2011/12 earthquakes gave me a very real context in which to consider the value of the art and the role of a gallery in a post-disaster context; the resonating takeaway there being that continuity was valuable, and the social imperative. Yet, arriving to this new landscape, where the architecture is not broken, but the bodies are, I am left to wonder: how will momentum remain when we can no longer engage in collective resilience? What will be the new conduit for those unexpectant collisions that cannot be articulated? How do we do this from home?
-Ella Sutherland
