My Father's Houses Frances Mocnik University of New South Wales A

All My Father’s Houses

Frances Mocnik

University of New South Wales

A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Fine Arts

Art & Design University of New South Wales

March 2015

‘When you are older I will build you a house so that you will always

have a place to live’.

Ivan Mocnik

This promise was repeated to me throughout my childhood. Delivered in lieu of a bedtime story, my parents and I would discuss in detail the house that I would one- day call home. After a lifetime of migration (voluntary and forced), the shelter of a home was my parent’s priority and dream. Unlike the bedtime story, reality took a tragic turn: ill health intervened and two deaths followed.

While my house was never constructed, my father did build some sixty-odd houses within the Australian Capital Territory. These homes now stand quietly, their histories buried along with their footings. Personal stories of place and belonging weave in and around their construction; they frame my history and are the ghosts in my life. They anchor me as a draftsman’s plans do a house, and serve to give meaning to place that creates belonging. I am a builder’s daughter and these are my houses.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ……………………………………………...………………..…...... iv Abstract ……………………………………………………………………………….….... vi Introduction ……………………………………………………………………….….……. 1

Chapter 1 Place in the migrant image …………………………………………………….….... 4 Here was my home ………………………………………………………………….. 7 Safe as houses ……………………………………………………………….…….. 10 House of memory - the archive …..……………………………………………….. 14 Remembering and forgetting .……………………………………………………... 17

Chapter 2 Simryn Gill ……………………………….………………………………………...… 22 Anne Ferran ……………..……………………………..…….……………………... 27 Taryn Simon ...……………………………………………….……………………… 31

Chapter 3 Homework…………………………………………………………………………….. 34 Carry me home…………………………………………………….…………..…..… 41 All my father’s houses……….…………...……………………………………..…... 56

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………….………….. 80 List of illustrations…………………………………………………………….………….. 83 Appendix………………………………………………………………………………….. 89

Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………...….. 98

iii Acknowledgements

This work, like a family narrative, has involved many people. Firstly, I would like to thank my supervisor, Debra Phillips, for her unerring support, insightful advice and academic guidance. I would also like to thank Claire Thompson for lending her professional eye to editing my words. Geoffrey Kolts, Kylie Wingrave and Mark Sariban I thank for proofreading early drafts and sub-editing. To Alessandro, Darinka and Massimiliano Basegni I am grateful for their friendship, support and assistance with my work in Florence, Italy. Heartfelt thanks goes to my husband Lang Hames who has supported my academic endeavours and tolerated the absences that it has entailed. My final words of gratitude are reserved for my mum, Anna Mocnik, who has been the narrator and keeper of memories.

In dedication and loving memory

Paul Mocnik [1975 – 1999]

Ivan Mocnik [1940 – 2007]

Paul and Frances Mocnik, Canberra c1979 Photograph Ivan Mocnik

v Abstract

This research paper documents three bodies of work that comprise the studio component of my Master of Fine Arts (MFA): HomeWork (2011), Carry me Home (2011) and All my father’s houses: a catalogue by a builder’s daughter (2011 – 2014). The third work also lends its title, in part, to that of this paper – All My Father’s Houses. The works are underpinned by a personal family narrative that, used as a pivot, relates critical theories of place, memory, migration and the archive. Importantly, the relationship between these ideas and my creative practice is created through a personal history of migration, both voluntary and forced, historical and ongoing.

This research was motivated by the actuality of loss and failure within private and public archives and the realisation that memory—and with it an important connection to place—will one day too, be lost. Provoked by these ideas, this work is a response to imagistic desires; it aims to translate experiences of memory into photographic form where, through representation, they can be possessed and made portable.

Contingent on the unpacking of a mobile migrant journey, notions of home, how we establish it and our sense of belonging within it, are questioned and clarified. Woven through these discussions is Marc Augé’s notion of place as a geographically bounded site in the real world and Lucy Lippard’s emotionally invested theories of place and the local. I further explore the relationship between my mobile migrant experience and notions of place and home by linking to John Di Stefano’s suggestion that the concept of home might be best understood through the experience of journey.

As a consequence of lost archives, this research has, by necessity, become a negotiation between memory, the archive, photography and place. Originating from a desire to give visual form to childhood memories, All my father’s houses: a catalogue by a builder’s daughter (2011-2014) proposes that photography can be used as a site for the production and representation of memory, one that is future-oriented and active in the construction of portable notions of place.

vi Introduction

‘As a sense of the past is tied to a sense of place, so too is memory, particularly personal and autobiographical memory, similarly tied to place and location. Moreover, as memory is in turn tied, in certain important aspects, to narrativity, so the connection between memory and place is indicative of a parallel connection between place and narrative’.1

This thesis engages with theoretical debates on place, memory and migration. It connects these theories to a photographic archival practice that explores the role of public and private archives in the formation of memory and a sense of place.

Methodologically, the studio practice hinges on information gathered through the process of memory work. Used in place of lost personal archives and absent official records, this externalized memory (personal and third party) is used to locate place in the physical world and has been used to produce the three works discussed below.

The three bodies of work, HomeWork (2011), Carry me Home (2011) and All my father’s houses: a catalogue by a builder’s daughter (2011 – 2014), produced for my Master of Fine Arts (MFA) are underpinned by a personal family narrative that, used as a pivot, relates critical theories of place, memory, migration and the archive. Importantly, the connection between these ideas and my creative practice is through my personal history of migration both voluntary and forced, historical and ongoing.

Lost archives, personal and public, haunt, motivate and inform my work. As a family we have lost a number of houses and with them our personal archives. These archives contained the details and locations of 60 houses that, built by my father, anchor me to geographical place and inform my understanding of place and belonging.

With the loss of these archives and as my childhood memories began to fade, I realised that I would soon lose an important connection to place. Prompted by these actualities I responded to an imagistic desire to translate my experiences of memory

1 Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography, p.181

1 into visual photographic form where I could possess—through representation—and make portable the fixed material objects that are the physical remainders of memory within geographical place. Like the artists discussed by Martha Langford in her book, Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art, I am interested in a sense of place as processed through memory and expressed in creative form.

In Chapter 1, I consider the meaning of place within the context of a mobile migrant journey, how it manifests in notions of home, how we establish it and our sense of belonging within it. As a starting point, I employ Marc Augé’s theories to consider place as geographically located in the real world. From here I connect to Lucy Lippard’s work and discuss the role of human agency and memory in the construction of the local. In parallel, my family narrative unfolds and speaks of multiple departures from and arrivals to place. Into this personal journey I weave Augé’s argument that the proliferation of the supermodern condition results in the waning of the meaning of place. I contest this notion and suggest that it is through the proliferation of this condition that the significance of place is thrown into high relief and new notions of belonging can be created. I continue to investigate this relationship between a mobile migrant experience and notions of place and home by linking to John Di Stefano’s suggestion that the notion of home might be best understood through the experience of journey.

In Chapter 2, I discuss the artists who have influenced my practice Simryn Gill, Anne Ferran and Taryn Simon. I am drawn to how Gill and Ferran interrogate, evoke and reference notions of place, belonging and postcolonial power structures that can be seen operating in and out of the archive. In considering the form my work takes I draw inspiration in Simon’s use of the archival form to structure and present her work.

In Chapter 3, I discuss my methodology, process of making images and the bodies of work produced. Prompted by the fragility of both memory and the archive, the works discussed collectively aim to give visual form to memories and, through representation, allow me to take possession of something that one day will be lost.

2 Each body of work responds to various failures in public and private archives that necessitate a turn to memory-work as a research method. Three structures of memory—mnemonic, post-memory and personal memory—are identified and utilised across the three bodies of work. In HomeWork, I turn to the family home as an archival source in an attempt to give visual form to memories of growing up a builder’s daughter. Mnemonic objects are recovered and when processed through photography point to broader notions of place and belonging as operating within a mobile migrant journey. Carry Me Home extends the process of memory-work and the resulting images are a transnational negotiation and processing of post-memory experiences.

The third body of work, All my father’s houses: a catalogue by a builder’s daughter is both the genesis and conclusion of my research. Originating from a desire to give visual form to memories of growing up as a builder’s daughter it exposes gaps in official archives and proposes that photography can be used as a site for the production and representation of memory, one which is future oriented and active in the construction of portable notions of place.

3 Chapter 1

Each section of this chapter is foregrounded with a brief extract from my family narrative. These narratives provide points of departure through which I connect to critical theories of home, place and belonging, migration and photography.

Place in the migrant image

Characterised by voluntary departures and forced dislocations, my family’s history and experience with place is an intricate trajectory of a migrant’s quest for a better life elsewhere. As a family it seems that in one way or another our lives have been in constant motion and engaged in the metaphorical and physical shifting of place.

My mother, Anna (Maver) Mocnik, was born in Italy in 1941 and, with the redrawing of borders at the close of WWII her hometown became incorporated into Yugoslavia (now Slovenia). It was in Yugoslavia that both my parents grew up, met and fell in love. My father feared a compulsory three-year military conscription and dreamed of a better life elsewhere so the unmarried childhood sweethearts made plans to flee their homeland. On a moonless night my father escaped across the border, illegally entering Italy as a refugee. After receiving word that he was safe, my mother followed. After a year in the refugee camp my father was unable to secure permanent residency in Italy and accepted a skilled migrant visa to Australia. He promised my mother (who remained in Italy to finish her apprenticeship as a dressmaker) that he would return to marry her and bring her to live with him in Australia, and after five long years, he did. The newlyweds finally set up home in Darwin, Australia with the expectation of a permanent and stable life. Aside from one return visit to their homeland, during which I was born, Darwin provided the stability my parents craved until Christmas Eve 1974, when Cyclone Tracy destroyed our home. My mother, who was eight and a half months pregnant, my grandmother and I were evacuated in the first airlift out of the devastated city and transported 3,900 kilometers across the continent to Sydney, a strange and unknown place. Eleven days later, my brother Paul was born. My father joined us some months later and together my parents decided that we would make yet another journey—this time to Canberra.

4 Considering this personal history, it comes as no surprise that I feel compelled to consider and question the creation and meaning of place and our sense of belonging within it. In Lure of the Local: Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society, Lucy Lippard also considers the concept of place as a creation of human experience. Place is ‘a portion of land/town/cityscape seen from the inside, the resonance of a specific location that is known and familiar. Place applies to our own ‘local’— entwined with personal memory, known or unknown histories, marks made in the land that provoke and evoke. Place is latitude and longitude. The latitude and longitude within the map of a person’s life. It is temporal, spatial, personal and political. A layered location replete with human histories and memories, place has width as well as depth. It is about connections, what surrounds it, what formed it, what happened there, what will happen there’. 2

One of the principal ways that the concept of place operates within my work is as a physical geographic location where memory is created. To provide a framework for these ideas I have adopted definitions of place, non-place and space as argued by French anthropologist Mark Augé in his book Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity.

Place, for Augé, possesses an anthropological quality—it has a history, identity and connection or reference to experiences that have happened there. In this sense, place contains movement, language and memory.3 The concept of supermodernity is predicated on the experience of modern-day life, where an accelerated means of travel offers an abundance of places to be. Augé describes this as ‘the spatial overabundance of the present’ 4 where time is overloaded with a saturation of events. This condition threatens us with the prospect of ever increasing or perpetual transit and suggests a form of detachment where our experience of place becomes only temporal and meaning is lost.5 It is my experience however, that it can be through this proliferation of the supermodern condition that the significance of place, as it comes into contact with other places, is thrown into high relief and new notions of belonging can be created.

2 Lippard, The lure of the local: senses of place in a multicentered society, p.7 3 Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, p.66 4 ibid, p.34 5 ibid, p.34-35

5 Space, by contrast, is a more abstract term and centres on the non-symbolic. As well as being used to describe the space within a house or home, it can also be used to describe the distance between two points or things (a race where the competitors run a space of one-hundred meters), or a more temporal experience (where exam results will be available in the space of one week). In this way, space is considered to be temporary and can exist independently of tangible place.6 In my work, this function of space appears in between connections and disconnection from place. It is both temporal (the time of absence from a connection to place), spatial (distance between places) and psychological (the space of imagination and memory).

Angelika Bammer describes home as ‘a mobile symbolic habitat, a performative way of life and of doing things in which one makes one’s home while in movement’.7 Bammer, while applying this idea directly to the experience of non-places (such as airport), suggests that transit itself might be thought of as a new way of belonging.

This relationship between transit and experience of place and home is revealed by TJ Demos in The Migrant Image: The Art and politics of Documentary during Global Crisis, where he reminds us that ‘it is important to avoid reading dislocation, in any of its guises, exclusively in the negative, as solely melancholic or chaotic, as if its identity were metaphysically rooted’.8 Within these discussions he defines the term migrant as being ‘a more impartial term that allows for voluntary movement and self-willed actors of mutability and belonging … the term offers the advantage of opening up the possibilities of conceptualizing a new form of life that is politically and aesthetically committed to a certain mobility’.9

In both focused and broad terms the idea of making one’s home within movement speaks to my family’s many forced and voluntary negotiations with departures and arrivals. While my parents sought a rooted life of permanence, what eventuated was a mobile migrant experience. Reflecting on these experiences I feel that the notion of place and home can be found in the process of traversing between places and in the

6 Augé, Non-places: Introducition to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, p.67 7 Brammer, as cited in Morley, Home Territories: Media, mobility and Identity, p.47 8 Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and politics of Documentary during Global Crisis, p.3 9 ibid, p.3

6 making and remaking of home. These lived experiences point to a global sense of place, one that is unthreatened by changes in mobility and where the ability to link the experience of one place to another highlights the specificity of the local.10 Certainly the lived experience of supermodernity, together with the interplay of global processes and local environments, informs my enquiry into how one manifests a home and creates a sense of place.

Here was my home

As a child, home was where stories were told. During dinner, my mother would entertain us by sharing memories from her past which were always epic tales of adventure, love and loss. More often than not, the narratives were underpinned by descriptions or references to photographs that journeyed between countries, but which were reluctantly abandoned during migration or destroyed in natural disasters. Without fail, each story began or ended with the loss of a home – a stark contrast to the comfort of the middle-class suburban house we then occupied.

In 2012, as part of the studio component of this MFA,11 I journeyed to the small town of Capoliveri on the Italian island of Elba. While exploring the hillside town I noticed a small hand-stenciled sign on the side wall of what was once a domestic building. It was no bigger than a postcard and hidden almost out of sight. On it were four simple words: Here was my home. To this day I don’t know who made the mark or why it was there, but this encounter touched me deeply, evoking in me a yearning for place and a stirring of nostalgia that connects my story to that of every other migrant, displaced person or refugee who has ever lost their home.

But what is home? The Oxford online dictionary, while acknowledging the word ‘home’ as one of the top one thousand most frequently used words in the English language, simply defines home as ‘the place where one lives permanently, especially as a

10 Massey, Space, Place and Gender, p.156 11 See Carry Me Home, Chapter 3, p.38

7 member of a family or household’.12 This surprisingly ‘one size fits all’ global description fails to acknowledge the many and nuanced meanings attached to the word, and concept, of home.

The word ‘house’ is less problematic. It clearly connotes a material structure that can offer occupants shelter from the environment and is usually a fixed entity that can be described as occupying and enclosing space within a geographically defined and bounded region.

The concept of home, however, extends far beyond the material structure of a house. In October 2014, on the anniversary of the 2013 Blue Mountain bush fires, I was listening to 702 ABC radio when a caller, responding to a question about the rebuilding of his destroyed house said: ‘Yes, my house is almost finished and we will move back in next week, but this new house is not my home’.13

My work investigates this broader, emotionally invested definition of home, which considers the place of home as a lived experience embedded with emotional investment and attachment. It is through this experience of human agency that space transforms into place. As Gaston Bachelard argues: ‘Social space, by being invested with our lived experience, becomes activated through our memory as ‘place’ and all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home’.14

Susan Saegert echoes this position in her paper The Role of Housing in the Experience of Dwelling, and introduces the concept of dwelling. Dwelling describes ‘the physical, social, and psychological transactions by which a person maintains his or her own life, joins that life with others, creates new lives and social categories, and gives meaning to the process, thus gaining a sense of identity and place in the world’.15 Importantly, this definition does not necessitate a connection between a physical housing unit and the experience of home.

12 Oxford Dictionaires, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/home , accessed 12 October, 2014 13 ABC 702 Friday 17 October 2014, http://www.abc.net.au/newsradio/content/s4108997.htm accessed October, 2014 14 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p.5 15 Saegert, The Role of Housing in the Experience of Dwelling, p.287

8 In Building, Dwelling, Thinking, Martin Heidegger proposes that we must ‘ever learn to dwell’. Philosopher Karsten Harries defines the process of ‘genuine dwelling’ as ‘a means not so much being at home but at most a continuous journeying home, a continuous homecoming, haunted by changing dreams of home’.16 This concept is further elucidated by Jennifer Johung, in Replacing Home: From Primordial Hut to Digital Network in Contemporary Art, where she considers how the ongoing notion of dwelling combines the physicality of a material structure and the performative process of making and remaking home over time.17

Viewed through the process of dwelling, it is clear that the experience of home is not limited to a physical housing unit but ‘connotes a more active and mobile relationship of individuals to the physical, social, and psychological spaces around them. Not only is it a place, it has psychological resonance and social meaning. It is part of the experience of dwelling—something we do, a way of weaving up a life in particular geographic spaces’.18 The space of a house and the place in a home may well be seen to coexist within the one material structure; it is, however, through dwelling, activity and memory making that we shift from space to place.

In Moving Images of Home, John Di Stefano considers our increasingly fluid relationship to physical geography and the effect of this actuality on how we think of, and experience, a sense of home and belonging. With particular focus on the experience of displaced people, he suggests that notions of home are now ‘best understood as a sense of being between places, rather than being rooted definitively in one singular place and, by extension, exclusively to one singular identity’.19 Home, for Di Stefano, is no longer a fixed notion; it is ‘a space or structure of activity and beliefs around which we construct a narrative of belonging’.20

16 Harries, The Ethical Function of Architecture, p.213 17 Johung, Relacing Home: From Primordial Hut to Digital Network in Contemporary Art, p.31 18 Johung, Relacing Home: From Primordial Hut to Digital Network in Contemporary Art, p.287 19 Di Stefano, Moving Images of Home, p.38 20 ibid, p.38

9 Safe as houses

Have you ever lost a house? Natural disaster, cyclone, flood, forced migration or some other kind of unfortunate or unfathomable accident? It is an unusual question, to which not many would answer yes. My family, however, is in the unenviable position of having lost a number of homes. ‘Safe as houses’ is a turn of phase that does not apply to my personal history, nor to the migrant trajectory.

My mother’s childhood home in Slovenia (then Yugoslavia) served a dual purpose: it was both village flourmill and family home. Through necessity, it was situated on the banks of the river Idrijca. At the end of winter when the snow began to melt, the river would rise and break its banks flooding the house with ice-cold water. If timed correctly, my mother’s parents could move their possessions to higher ground and evacuate their children. The family had always believed that the river would eventually claim the final victory; however, it took an earthquake to damage the house beyond repair.

Years later, my parents’ first home in Darwin was destroyed by Cyclone Tracy.21 Having been forcefully ejected from their migrant home of choice my parents were faced with the prospect of (again) seeking a new place to live. After careful consideration, they chose Canberra, an inland Australian city far from the coast the threat of cyclones, floods or earthquakes. The youthful and emerging capital city provided us both a place to (re)build our home and a place for my father to earn a living building houses in Canberra’s ever expanding suburbs. In 2003, Canberra was threatened by bushfire—a natural disaster not accounted for in my parent’s planning. A state of national disaster was declared and we were advised to evacuate as the fire surrounded our suburb and began to threaten houses and lives. Knowing the trauma of losing a home, we decided to stay and defend our house, saving it from the fate of the 431 others that were lost or damaged.

21 Tropical Cyclone Tracy devastated the Australian City of Darwin on Christmas Eve 1974. Winds were measured in excess of 217 km per hour before monitoring equipment was destroyed—unofficial records place speeds at 300 km per hour. Approximately 80% of homes were destroyed leaving 41,000 out of a population of 47,000 homeless. Bureau of Meteorology Australia http://www.bom.gov.au/cyclone/history/tracy.shtml sourced November 2014, and National Archives of Australia http://web.archive.org/web/20050212230435/http://naa.gov.au/fsheets/FS176.html accessed November 2014

Canberra house during the 2003 bush fires, Anna Mocnik

Darwin house after Cyclone Tracy, 1974, Ivan Mocnik

Slovenia house during spring floods, c1960 Photographer unknown

13 As evidenced in the opening narrative, house and home are concepts that I have always sensed as being under threat. Nikos Papastergiadis, in discussing the migrant diaspora, writes that ‘modernity is haunted by the image of its lost homes and by the stress of living in a permanent state of homelessness’.22

While I have long understood that the material concept of home can come under external threat and is subject to instability, I have simultaneously experienced it as a place of comfort, security and enjoyment. These two contrasting subjective experiences are echoed by Keith Jacobs and Jeff Malpas in their paper Material Object, Identity and the Home: Towards a Relational Housing Research Agenda. Here, the writers similarly identify home as a problematic concept where ideas of comfort, safety and refuge coexist with notions of home as a place that is imbued with risk (as is the case with domestic violence) or under threat of incoming others (migrants), while the ever-growing population of displaced and homeless people further challenge a singular, stable notion of home.

House of memory - the archive

Boxes of receipts, odd photographs, expired insurance policies, electricity bills and old greeting cards are considered by many to be the flotsam and jetsam of life—as annoying clutter to be boxed, forgotten or thrown out. For the members of my family, who have experienced a repeated loss of place, these everyday items take on greater meaning, and in their accumulated volume we see signs, and proof, that we have survived.

For many decades, a collection of about 60 folders occupied shelf space in a storeroom underneath my parents’ house. Dog-eared and bleached by time, these folders bulged with a gut of paperwork and were identified by a block and section number—four or five simple digits used by surveyors to define a geographical block of land and the house that stands upon it. These folders contained myriad small and large details that, when combined, documented every aspect of the transition of an empty block of land into a house that my father had built. I felt secure in the knowledge that

22 Morley, Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity, p.42

14 these folders were safely archived, a reminder of how my family created a sense of place and home. But like the houses that came before them, these archives were somehow lost in the aftermath of my father’s death in 2007.

For the past eight years, my personal archive (documents, tax papers, work, personal and artist diaries, various boxes of photographs and other mnemonic ephemera) has been carefully housed in a locked storage cage located in the basement of the apartment block in which I live. Despite the care with which the contents were kept, another tenant discarded my belongings, believing that the storage unit belonged to him. I discovered this loss weeks later, long after the bins containing my life memories had been collected and taken away. Staring at the now emptied cage, I felt a sense of dislocation, as though it was I who was in in the wrong place.

Jacques Derrida deconstructs the idea of the archive in his influential book Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression. Distilling his analysis to its simplest form, the archive can be considered as a place where unique records are stored in a considered and retrievable manner. By acting as a depository for the impressions of our past the archive enables memory, however, it is inclusion and exclusion of information that will determine which histories are remembered and which are forgotten. In my own archival interventions I have experienced both the loss of personal archives and omission from official records.

Sarah Bassnett in Archive and Affect in Contemporary Photography, discusses how contemporary photographic artists engage archival theory and practice to challenge established narratives and address what has been lost. Bassnett identifies two methods that I too utilise in my practice—photographer as archivist and the re- animation of an archive. In evoking the archive I similarly engage viewers in what she describes as an affective response,23 where an ‘understanding of photography’s role in negotiating loss is enabled’.24

23 Jill Bennett describes the experience of affect as one where a viewer has an embodied experience of sensation where affect is ‘a process of “seeing feeling” where feeling is both imagined and regenerated through an encounter with the artwork’. Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art 24 ibid, p.250

15 Curator Okwui Enwezor in Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art discusses how contemporary artists engage with the idea of the archive. Instead of ‘a dim, musty place full of drawers, filing cabinets and shelves laden with old documents, an inert repository of historical artifacts’,25 the archive is ‘an active, regulatory discursive system’.26

‘Artists interrogate the self-evidentiary claims of the archive by reading it against the grain. This interrogation may take aim at the structural and functional principles underlying the use of the archival document, or it may result in the creation of another archival structure as a means of establishing an archaeological relationship to history, evidence, information, and data that will give rise to its own interpretive categories’.27

An Archival Impulse is both the title Hal Foster takes for his paper and the descriptor for an impulse that he identifies as being at work in international contemporary art. Foster describes the archival artist as one who ‘seeks to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present’.28 While these enquiries can draw on the familiar or mass culture, it is the terrain of alternative knowledge and counter-memory that interests Foster. Artists working with these motives, he continues, are ‘less concerned with absolute origins than with obscure traces … these artists are often drawn to unfulfilled beginnings or incomplete projects —in art and in history alike— that might offer some points of departure again’.29

Taking artists Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean and Sam Durant as exemplars, Foster points out that their practices not only draw from informal archives but produce them as well. The self-described methodologies of these artists (Dean employs ‘collection’, Durant ‘combination’ and Hirschhorn ‘ramification’) foreground the idea that all archival material is ‘found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private’.30 Hirschhorn, in describing the various forms his work takes, describes his archival impulses as

25 Enwezor, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Document in Contemporary Art, p.11 26 ibid, p.11 27 ibid, p.18 28 Foster, An Archival Impulse, p.4 29 ibid p5 30 ibid p5

16 ‘wanting to connect what cannot be connected’31 and make ‘spaces for the movement and endlessness of thinking…’.32

I, too, engage the archive through my methodology of collecting (via photographic representation) souvenirs of my past. Through representation I bring together large, fixed material objects and seek to establish a counter-archive, that exposes gaps in existing archives, and where divergent narratives can operate.

Remembering and forgetting

‘More often than not, it is the displaced person who attempts to make tangible what is missing and absent’.33

In 1995, my great-aunt Pina became aware that she was dying. She asked my mother, in the way of a living will, if there were any of her possessions that my mother would like to have. Some weeks after the phone call, my mother travelled from Australia to Meleto, a small Tuscan village south of Florence, and collected a parcel. Inside were photographs from her youth and those she had sent to Italy in the years between her marriage and migration to Australia (1964) and our forced dislocation from Darwin (1974). Importantly, these material objects were duplicates of photographs lost or damaged when Cyclone Tracy destroyed our home; making the exercise, in effect, a journey to restore the lost family archive.

Wright Morris, in Time Pieces: Photographs, Writing and Memory, suggests that as memories fade and we begin to forget, we turn to photographs to fill in the missing pieces. Photographs connect us to our past and they ‘affirm all that is visible, and photographs will affirm what is one day remembered’.34

31 cited in: Foster, An Archival Impulse, p.10 32 ibid, p.6 33 Di Stefano, Moving Images of Home, p.19 34 Morris, Time Pieces Photographs, Writing and Memory (Writers & Artists on Photography), p.22

17 The relationship between memory, photography and the archive is of particular interest to me because the photographs that Morris offers as an antidote to the failure of memory, for my family, largely do not exist. It is this absence that provokes my imagistic desires and creative practice.

In Editorial: Special Issue of Photography, Archive and Memory, Karen Cross and Julia Peck assemble a collection of essays that aim to ‘elucidate how memory as a concept can become useful in further understanding photography and the archive.’ 35 My work also concerns itself with remembering and forgetting, functions inherent to the three territories of photography, memory and the archive. My interest stems from the destruction of personal archives and the failure of official archives to consign (or make accessible) records of my family’s history within Australia.

In terms of function, both memory and photography act to record images that can be used to recall the past, yet they do so in very different ways. Photography has the ability to mechanically produce a physical record of the world that can be archived, retrieved and viewed as desired. In this way, a photograph can be brought forward to confirm what is pictured. Memory, on the other hand, while also often characterised as an archive (where things, meanings and objects can be stored and called upon to recover the past), has no material or physical form to offer as evidence to testimony. As such, memory is always a mediation of the past as filtered, shaped and viewed ‘by the laws and practices of the present, which provide the structures for remembrance to take place’.36

While a photograph can be a mnemonic device, particularly due to its connection to the referent, it can also facilitate forgetting by exclusion (through framing) of events, people or landscape, or in its ability to inhibit mnemonic responses. This function is extended when considered within the context of the archive: what is or isn’t remembered within an archival structure is governed by what is and isn’t included. In Reading the Archive, Allan Sekula calls for a critical analysis of photography and the archive, one that allows for the reconfiguration of ‘knowledge, its ownership and modes of production’.37 One of

35 Cross & Peck, Editorial: Special Issue on Photography, Archive and Memory, p.127 36 Cross & Peck, Editorial: Special Issue on Photography, Archive and Memory, p.127 37 ibid, p.128

18 the concerns Sekula raises is the power structure inherent in the archive and the exclusion of working class subjectivity. In arguing that the archive does not support a working-class perspective of remembering, he advocates for an opening up of these structures and for the formation of new types of archives where counter-memory and expressions of personal history can testify to previously excluded narratives.38

I, too, engage with official archives from the bottom-up perspective of a working-class narrative. In the bodies of work produced for this MFA I give visual form to personal counter-memories and histories that, while operating within the orbit of broader official records, have not been recorded nor consigned within official archives.

The destruction of my personal archives and the absences within official records point to the broader critical issue that both memory and the archive are fragile. In Between Memory and History, Nora Pierre suggests that we are interested in memory because there is so little left. While this might be so, I am conscious that the memories we do have are our own and it is what we do with these memories that will determine which histories are remembered and in what form.

‘... if memories are one individual’s, their association extends far beyond the personal. They spread into an extended network of meanings that bring together the personal with the familial, the cultural, the economic, the social, the historical. Memory-work makes it possible to explore connections between ‘public’ historical events, structures of feeling, family dramas, relations of class, national identity and gender, and ‘personal’ memory. In these cases histories outer and inner, social and personal, historical and physical coalesce; and the web of interconnections that binds them together is made visible’.39

In my research I employ memory-work as a method of discovery and active construction of past activity and events. This process embodies certain assumptions described by Annette Kuhn in A journey through memory, where memory-work is

38 Cross & Peck, Editorial: Special Issue on Photography, Archive and Memory, p.128 39 Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination, p.5

19 ‘an active practice of remembering that takes an inquiring attitude towards the past and the activity of its (re)construction through memory. Memory-work undercuts assumptions about the transparency of the authenticity of what is remembered, taking it not as ‘truth’ but as evidence of a particular sort: material for interpretation, to be interrogated and mined, for its meanings and its possibilities. Memory-work is a conscious and purposeful staging of memory’.40

Another process operating in the production of meaning, as connected in and through place, is intergenerational memory transmission. Marianne Hirsch uses the term ‘post- memory’ to describes the ‘relationship of the second generation to powerful experiences, often traumatic that preceded their births but that were transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right’.41 Post-memory differs from memory based upon generational difference and from personal connection to history and it characterises the experiences of those who have grown up dominated by the stories of the generations that came before them.42

Michael O’Brian’s visual essay Mum’s Got To Sell The House was prompted by his mother’s decision to sell the family home. Like many artists working with memory O’Brian, in a desire to still time and space, used photography to take possession of a significant place before it was lost.43 In essence, the photograph became ‘the location for the reproduction and representation of memory’.44 This process he describes as a reconciliation with past lives, rather than an attempt at stasis. Similarly, I use photography to ‘take possession’ of places significant to me before they too are lost.

Photography, ‘through its ability to transfer our subjective experiences into images, allows us to attach a material object to the intangible passing of time’.45 In my work, I use photography to take possession, through representation, of something I no longer

40 Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination, p.157 41 Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, p.103 42 Marianne Hirsch in Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory originally used the term post-memory to describe the experiences of those who grow up overshadowed by narratives created before their birth. Applied initially to the experience of holocaust survivors and their children the term is now utilized to describer broader circumstances where narratives that precede ones birth impact the experiences of a subsequent generation. 43 O’Brian, Mum’s Got To Sell The House, p.189 44 ibid, p.196 45 Anwandter, Frames of Mind: Photography, Memory and Identity, p.6

20 possess. It allows me to create a record of a time and place and to translate large, fixed material objects (houses) into portable objects that can be kept, archived, viewed at will, or returned to the public sphere in exhibition form.

For me, the photograph represents both an imaged place and an imagined one. I use the photograph to image physical geographical locations that are connected to my childhood memories. In this way, place, as depicted in my photographs represents the imagined place of memory but what it images is place as mediated by present time — a negotiation between the past and the present. As Roland Barthes writes in Camera Lucida, ‘there is a superimposition here: that of reality and of the past’.46

My interest in photography is through its function as a photo-documentary device. Extending from my own professional practice of photo-journalism, I am interested in photography’s ability to image the world in a documentary way and simultaneously convey the specificities of a given place and time while suggesting multiple narratives.

Photography’s ability to provoke memory as a mnemonic device and its indexical function within the archive is important to my practice. In Dialogues in the Diasporas: Essays and Conversations on Cultural Identity, Nikos Papastergiadis discusses the task of ‘excavating from the remains of history fragments that signify the qualities of lived experience’.47 The process he describes is additionally problematic for the diasporic writer [artists] as, so often, so little remains other than that retained in memory. As is in my situation, historical sources, including various archives, are either inaccessible, subject to the tyranny of distance or have been destroyed through time and history. What remains is a performance of memory; a narrative that is both a journey, and, like an archive, a place in itself.

46 Barthes, Camera Lucida: reflections on photography, p.76 47 Papastergiadis, Dialogues in the Diasporas: Essays and Conversations on Cultural Identity, p.182

21 Chapter 2

Here I consider the artists from whom I draw inspiration and acknowledge their contribution to my practice. I am interested in artists who concern themselves with the connections between public and cultural memory, larger history and private family memory and stories.

Simryn Gill

Simryn Gill’s oeuvre embodies her attempt to make sense of the world. Gill describes this methodology as a process of trying to make sense of a place that she doesn’t understand or fit into.48 ‘My activity is a way of thinking about how to be in the world, a kind of thinking aloud. A lot of us just work with our reality and my reality happens to be [that] I have had a lot of mobility, so perhaps some of the questions come out of how do I be in a new place, in a place that I do not have a historical connection with’. 49

Malaysian of Indian origin, Gill now describes herself as a permanent resident in Australia, but makes it clear that she is not an Australian.50 I am interested in Gill as an artist who has come to Australia and looked deeply. In Here Art Grows on Trees, the catalogue accompaniment to Gill’s 2013 Venice Biennale exhibition, editor Catherine de Zegher discusses Gill’s work as connected to stories of arrivals and departures, of how we find ourselves in a new place after leaving somewhere else. This statement reflects my own concerns around place; as a person who has experienced a number of arrivals and departures, I have come to realise that, like the physical and metaphorical material Gill works with, I too am formed from these experiences. My memories, reinforced by family narrative and post-memory experiences are, like much of Gill’s

48 ABC Arts, Here art grows on trees, Simryn Gill at the Venice Biennale. http://www.abc.net.au/arts/stories/s3770944.htm, sourced 30 December 2014 49 Jeffrey, A sense of her place in the world; Inside and out, Simryn Gill’s images are all about being there, whatever ‘there’ is, http://www.heraldscotland.com/sport/spl/aberdeen/a-sense- of-her-place-in-the-world-inside-or-out-simryn-gill-s-images-are-all-about-being-there- whatever-there-is-says-moira-jeffrey-1.113276, sourced October 2014 50 ABC Arts, Here art grows on trees, Simryn Gill at the Venice Biennale. http://www.abc.net.au/arts/stories/s3770944.htm, sourced 30 December 2014

22 work—occurring in the gap between ‘being in a place and being of a place, between living there and belonging there’.51

Using photography, text and object archives, both personal and otherwise, Gill’s work can be seen as interpreting and re-interpreting histories of places and objects. As Gill traverses between Australia and Malaysia, her practice reveals new connections between places and objects. Experiences of migration, moving between places and notions of displacement can all be found operating across and through Gill’s work. Similarly, these themes underpin and connect the three bodies of work produced for this MFA.

Gill also makes work in locations with which she shares an intimate connection. For the work in Dalam Gill returned to the Malaysian peninsula and asked herself: ‘Is there such a thing as a place? Can you see Malaysia if you take away all the maps and borders? Does it cohere?’ 52

Dalam is a collection of 258 images of living-room interiors taken across the Malaysian peninsula. They depict a broad range of circumstances from the overtly wealthy to more humble abodes. The work considers the homes as a lived site and an imaginative and metaphorical space of belonging. While the images are rich and crowded with detail they are consistently void of people. Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson in writing on Dalam discusses the absence of people and suggests that it is this very absence that conveys, ‘in an ‘abstract’ sense how Gill found herself in each individual place’.53

Gill’s work speaks of place and what it is like to be in it. ‘We all are how we are and there’s no-one without an identity, it seems to me. We are all born into our history, and that’s where we work out of. It’s like water’s wet. What do I do?’.54

51 de Zegher, Simryn Gill: Here art grows on trees, p.187 52 Jeffrey, A sense of her place in the world; Inside and out, Simryn Gill’s images are all about being there, whatever ‘there’ is, http://www.heraldscotland.com/sport/spl/aberdeen/a-sense- of-her-place-in-the-world-inside-or-out-simryn-gill-s-images-are-all-about-being-there- whatever-there-is-says-moira-jeffrey-1.113276 53 Zuckerman Jacoson, H. Dalam, in Simryn Gill: selected work, p.19 54 Jeffrey, A sense of her place in the world; Inside and out, Simryn Gill’s images are all about being there, whatever ‘there’ is, The Heralds, Glasgo UK, 18 July 2003

Simryn Gill from the series Dalam, 2001 C-type prints 34 x 34 cm

Simryn Gill Dalam, 2001 Installation view at the Tate Modern

My practice also concerns itself with the history that I have been born into. Like Gill, I traverse countries sharing my time between Australia and the USA, and this experience provokes me to question notions of place and belonging. I too am drawn to places of personal intimacy, yet, unlike Gill’s Dalam, I choose to consider place through the very specific filter of personal sites of agency and place-making. To this end, I engage my family narrative to question what it is to experience a sense of place and belonging, and how one might achieve this in contemporary times. I am interested in the home as a lived site and as an imaginative and metaphorical space of belonging. Similarly, the politics and culture built into Gill’s work can be suggested as operating in All my father’s houses: a catalogue by a builder’s daughter.

26 Anne Ferran

Stories and histories of lost places and people perpetually surface in the work of Anne Ferran. Those who fall outside official records, or for whom history shows no trace, might find themselves reawakened in Ferran’s alternative narratives and counterpoints to official histories. Individually and as a whole, Ferran’s stable of work asks us to reconsider what is and isn’t remembered, and why.

Across her work Ferran's methodology demonstrates a sustained interest in the silences, gaps and omissions operating within records and archives. Speaking at the University of Tasmania, Ferran describes this interest and how an artist’s creative engagement has the ‘ability to make something appear in the place where there was only a gap before’.55 This idea of making something appear within the space of a gap is extended by Shelley McSpedden in Anne Ferran; the forgotten archive. Here McSpedden considers Ferran's engagement with historical archives as the ‘ability to forge a material and emotional resonance between the past and present’.56

Ferran describes her methodology in this context as using the landscape to connect to past events and inhabitants. This experience provides her with a sense of grounding to place, a continuity with the past and a deeper understanding of the place in which she lives.57 Working in this way ‘points toward a thinking through histories; not by explaining events, but by framing places as experienced in present time and evoked through the land.58

Similarly, my work frames present-day places as a way of connecting to the past. In All my father’s houses: a catalogue by a builder’s daughter I bring together a collection of houses that while imaged in present time, evoke both the presence of the builder and the layered lives of subsequent occupants. In focusing attention on these material objects, multiple histories are suggested and arc between past and present through the conduit of the land.

55 Ferran, Anne Ferran (Art Forum) eprints.utas.edu/9180/1/anne_ferran_15_8_08.mp4 accessed December 2014, 22:30 56 McSpedden, Anne Ferran: The Forgotten Archive, Eyeline Contemporary Visual Culture, p.35 57 Ferran, Anne Ferran (Art Forum) eprints.utas.edu/9180/1/anne_ferran_15_8_08.mp4 accessed December 2014 58 ibid

Anne Ferran From the series Lost to Worlds 2008 Digital print on aluminium Each 120 x 120 cm

29 In Lost to Worlds 2008, Ferran looks to the present, via landscape, to reveal ‘past’s persistent presence’ and asks: ‘Is it possible for a place to release what it knows?’59 Susan Best, in her paper, Witnessing and Untimely Images: Anne Ferran’s ‘Lost to Worlds’, describes this work as the redress of a historical gap and an attempt to make visible the ‘haunting of the present by the past’. Importantly, as Best suggests, the work does not attempt to fill, mend or repair the gap; instead, Ferran’s work asks us to contemplate these omissions, absences and gaps and asks us to question how, and for what reasons, have these people and histories slipped through space and their place in history’s net.60

In Australian Artists in the Contemporary Museum, Jennifer Barret and Jacqueline Millner describe Ferran’s work as ‘eliciting presence from historical absence’61 and suggests that absence itself can be context.62 Similarly, my work is concerned with the absence and gaps in archives and seeks to provide counter-memories where neglected narratives are excavated and viewed through the lens of the present. My enquires, like Ferran’s, are concerned with human agency in geographical place and the traces that remain.

59 Stills, Anne Ferran – Lost to Worlds http://www.stillsgallery.com.au/exhibitions/2009/index.php?obj_id=ferran 60 Coleman, Anne Ferran. Review posted 08 Feb 2014 http://artguide.com.au/articles- page/show/anne-ferran-2/ 61 Barret, & Millner, Australian Artists in the Contemporary Museum, p.121 62 Ibid, p.121

30 Taryn Simon

Simon’s methodological approach to the systematic engagement of photography and the archival form has influenced numerous facets of my image making. In her work A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII Simon employs a fixed method of working within the serial form. Using a large format camera and travelling with studio lighting equipment Simon faithfully reproduces a predetermined lighting and framing style across 817 portrait subjects. The resulting images give the appearance of a comprehensive collection and are presented in a manner that evokes the sense of an archive.

I am specifically interested in Simon’s employment of photography to record what is ‘seen within the classification process of the archive, a system of knowing that feigns neutrality while quietly imposing a framing decided in advance’.63 This influence can be seen operating in the methodology I adopt in the production of All my father’s houses: a catalogue by a builder’s daughter, in which I photograph each subject (house) individually but exhibit the images as a complete and ordered collection. In this way the work both affirms and denies the individuality of each subject while simultaneously suggesting a greater narrative.

In Revenant Geoffrey Batchen describes Simon’s use of photography as both a visual formula and an art form.64 Like Simon I also eschew aesthetic elaborations in favour a systematic serial form and flat frontal images. Batchen links this methodological combination to a particular artistic genealogy that finds it’s genesis in the documentary photographic style of Walker Evans in the 1930’s and he describes Simon’s work as ‘the systematic reiterations and semiotic concerns of conceptual art as married to a documentary photographic style’.65

Like Simon, I am interested in the production of an absolute catalogue, one that cannot be altered by choice or aesthetic preferences. Yet unlike Simon who adopts the narratives of strangers, my subject is determined by my life circumstance and memory.

63 Batchen, G. Revenant, in Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I- XVIII, p.743 64 ibid, p.739 65 ibid, p.751

31 I am drawn to the visual form of Simon’s work. Presented as three segments, the work suggests the authority of documents. The first segment contains photographic portraits that are ordered into a gridded matrix. The accuracy and prescription, is however, punctuated by empty cells that represent subjects who could not be found or declined to participate. The second segment contains a written narrative and the third a collection of images presented in a less ordered, more random fashion.

The three panels establish a system of viewing that physically mobilises the viewer to move forward and back in order to both view the portraits and read the narrative. The third panel of supplementary images contrast against the order imposed in the first and alludes to broader narratives.

Taryn Simon A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII, Chapter I, 2011 Detail of three panel installation 84 x 118 4/5 inches (213.4 x301.7cm)

Taryn Simon A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I – XVIII Installation view, Amine Rech Gallery, Paris, 25.05 — 28.07.12

I, too, activate the notion of an archival system and evoke the authority of the document by presenting my images within the ordered context of a catalogue. This large concertinaed document is designed to stand upright, and when extended for viewing measures over four metres (see Appendix p.89 for documentation). Similarly, blank cells punctuate the work, activating notions of absence and presence in the archive.

In a manner similar to Simon’s panel of supplementary images the broader narrative operating in my work is alluded to through additional wall mounted images. While the narrative underpinning the images is not expressed in written form, the work does request that the view consider the broader narratives that arc between the ordered and the chaotic, the personal and the public.

33 Chapter 3

Here I discuss three bodies of work, HomeWork (2011), Carry Me Home (2011) and All my father’s houses: a catalogue by a builder’s daughter (2011 - 2014). These works have been created in fulfilment of the studio component of my MFA. Each work responds to gaps in personal and official archives and by necessity has engaged memory-work as a research method and source of archival information. In reference to these works I consider how the artists discussed in Chapter 2 have influenced my art- making process.

Homework

‘The eye does not see things, but images of things that mean other things’. 66

Look in my desk drawer and you will find a small pencil. It is rectangular in form and only about an inch long, and while marked with use, its once shiny red coat is still evident. Despite its diminished stature it remains unmistakably a carpenter’s pencil. This tiny relic usually goes unnoticed, but when it occasionally pops into view it does so with great rupture and I am transported back through history to another time and place. You see, my father was a builder and in the course of his work he used hundreds of these ubiquitous pencils, but this one is different: it was his last.

Mnemonic objects, such as the pencil described above, function as triggers to memory. They disrupt the course of everyday life and serve to evoke otherwise latent memories. As with a performed and witnessed act of memory, the process of creating artwork from mnemonic objects returns them to the bank of cultural knowledge and makes new connections. This process is discussed by Martha Langford in Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art, where she discusses the use of the artifact and its representation of personal memory.67 Like Langford I am interested in the translation of personal experiences into photographic images that cultivate mnemonic experience within a broader audience.

66 Calvino, Invisible Cities, p.13 67 Langford, Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art, p.29

34 With the loss of the family archive described in Chapter 1, I engaged the family home as a site of meaning and depository of lost narratives. Like the diasporic writers and artists (such as Elizabeth Gertsakis) referenced by Nikos Papastergiadis in Dialogues in the diasporas: essays and conversations on cultural identity, my appeal to the home was for traces and fragments that might signify the lived experience of growing up as a builder’s daughter and give these memories visual form. This excavation of the home revealed four objects, and a number of documents.

Translated into photographic images these objects collectively and individually release readings that speak of building, place-making and dwelling. The images are individual yet connected: they imply a narrative reminiscent of a family album and are photographed in a manner that suggests an optimistic engagement with the making of home. The images are intended as mnemonic objects that may provoke a connection with an audience beyond those primarily connected to them. Akin to the experience of viewing a family album, the images are intended to mobilse the viewer into a place of imagination where narratives are implied.

Resolved as a series images, HomeWork comprised of four individual works; Paul aged 8, Tapestry House, Carpenter’s Pencil and Contact Proof Home; Block & Section

17 / 224 (see pages 37 – 40 for illustrations). Individually and collectively these works serve to activate memory and create connections with broader audiences. This process is exemplified in the following extended discussion of HomeWork—Paul aged 8.

HomeWork—Paul aged 8 depicts the reverse view of a small tapestry house. The naive aesthetic suggests that this tapestry has been made by a child. The threads employed are of varying thickness, texture and colour and I recognised them as remnants from my mother’s cache of haberdashery supplies, likewise the canvas. The timber frame, joined at right angles, is another repurposing of remnant supplies (this time timber from one of my father’s houses). Seven brass thumbtacks hold the canvas onto the frame and close inspection reveals machine made, zig-zag stitches, binding all four edges of the canvas. These stitches are my mother’s work and were put in place to ensure that this small effigy of a house doesn’t unravel.

35 Seen on the verso, threads traverse the canvas in turbulent trajectories and unexpected ways. Tracking from one place to another within the geography of the canvas these threads can be seen to represent disconnections and connections from and to place. At each destination, place-making occurs and is symbolised by the (needle)work that forms up the house. The physical task of stitching alludes to both a temporal duration and the human agency that transforms space to place, and house to home. These threads, symbolic of the trajectory of a mobile migrant journey may well be seen to traverse place to place, yet they remain, firmly under the one roof of home.

This tapestry has hung on our family room wall for decades and has witnessed many things, including the unfortunate and untimely death of its maker, my brother Paul Mocnik in 1999. As a mnemonic object the tapestry connects me to childhood memories, however, it is the tapestry’s verso that metaphorically suggests the critical debates operating around home as a site of emotionally invested, lived experience.

Frances Mocnik HomeWork – Paul aged 8, 2011 C-type print 45 cm x 53 cm

Frances Mocnik Carpenter’s Pencil, 2011 C-type print 29 cm x 37cm

Frances Mocnik Tapestry House, 2011 C-type print 29 cm x 37cm

Frances Mocnik Contact Proof Home; Block & Section 17 / 224 C-type print 29 cm x 37cm

40 Carry me home

Carry Me Home is comprised of 10 images created during a journey across three countries; Slovenia, Italy and Australia in 2012. On this journey I returned a selection of images from my mother’s (recovered) family album to their places of origin, the referent back in place, so to speak. The intention was to suture the images into the present by re-photographing them and combining within a single frame, the historical image, a backdrop of the broader landscape as imaged by present time and my hand. The hand represents a literal and metaphorical ‘stepping into the picture’. It is an acknowledgment that the narrative underpinning these images comes to me through post-memory transmission, and while the events depicted occurred before I was born I carry them as my own. This work is a response to failures in official and private archives and represents a conscious negotiation with the process and processing of post-memory as connected to experiences of place and a mobile migrant journey.

Return visits to places of memory is a creative trope utilised in the documentary Al pie del árbol blanco. In the paper Personal Museums of Memory: The Recovery of Lost

(National) Histories in the Uruguayan Documentaries Al pie del árbol blanco and El círculo, David Marin-Jones and María Soledad Montañez consider the cinematographic techniques of these films and how they employ present day places to depict and reconstruct a link between the past and the present. Of specific interest to my work is the documentary Al Pie del árbol blanco where recovered historical photographs are returned to their site of origin. This process of linking recovered images to present-day spaces is described as creating a ‘virtual museum of memory in which images of the past co-exist with images of present-day spaces’.68 In similar ways my work combines expressions of personal history as connected through place, not only to greater histories, but also to the phenomenological experience of post-memory. In this context, and as demonstrated in Al pie del árbol blanco individual efforts to address lost parts of personal history can act to fill in the gaps of official recollection of history.

68 Martin-Jones and Soledad Montanez, Personal Museums of Memory: The Recovery of Lost (National) Histories in the Uruguayan Documentaries Al pie del árbol blanco and El círculo, p.79

41 As in Al pie del árbol blanco the works created for Carry Me Home are the site for the production and processing of memory. In returning a historical image to its original location and re-photographing it layered against a present-day backdrop, a virtual past and an actual present are brought together to co-exist in the one moment and in the one frame. This coexistence represents ‘a lost moment returned to the particular place’ and ‘fills in for the absent official history of events, otherwise practically erased from official records and surviving only in witness testimony’.69

The trope of ‘returns’ has enjoyed renewed popularity with the launch in 2013 of Dear Photograph, a website (and subsequent book) that curates returned images. Unlike the work of conceptual image-makers like Ken Josephson (who in his series Picture-within- a-picture, uses the technique to investigate the ‘parameters of photography itself’ 70 and picture-making as a means of knowing the real world), Dear Photograph eschews engagement with critical photographic theory and instead it throws a proletarian embrace around members of the public, who are invited to submit images accompanied by short letters addressed to the image itself (Dear Photograph, we were happy and now you are gone). The resulting entries point to a nostalgic evocation of matters of the heart and a common theme of loss. While this reverie appears overwhelmingly personal, it also images the materiality of the photograph within the frame of digital technology and underlies each entry with a comment on the ‘waning materiality of photography itself’.71

69 Martin-Jones and Soledad Montanez, Personal Museums of Memory: The Recovery of Lost (National) Histories in the Uruguayan Documentaries Al pie del árbol blanco and El círculo, p.80 70 Heiferman, Get Back To Where You Once Belonged, p.77 71 ibid, p.77

Screen grab, www.dearphotograph.com, sourced December, 2014

The use of the document by contemporary artists to rethink history, memory and loss is explored by Okwui Enwezor in Archive Fever; Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art. Here the archive is discussed as a site of conceptual and physical space where artists such as Tacita Dean, Christian Bolanski and Felix Gonzalez-Torres explore relationships between archival structures, photography and memory. Exemplified in the work of these artists is photography’s dual function as artistic medium and archival 72 record.

Photography’s function as both archival record and form is also evident in family snapshots. Created as aide-mémoires these photographs are archival objects that form personal archives. In turn these archives, in their function as a repository of the impressions of our past, can be used to enable memory.73

‘In this prosaic form, the photograph becomes the sovereign analogue of identity, memory and history, joining past and present, virtual and real, thus giving the photographic document the aura of an anthropological artefact and the authority of a social document.’ 74

72 Okwui, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, p.11 73 ibid, p.12 74 ibid, p.13

43 Like the work of artists discussed by Foster in An Archival Impulse, I work with historical information that is lost and displaced. The images created in Carry Me Home draw on informal archives while simultaneously producing them. In this negotiation with post-memory experiences, counter-memories are created and readings beyond those associated with conventional family albums are suggested. This narrative, although unexplained, arcs between past and present while simultaneously opening to the future.

44 Sydney, Australia, 2011 Historical photographs awaiting their return to ‘place’ Photograph Frances Mocnik

Frances Mocnik working on location, Slovenia, 2011 Dr Alessandro Basegni identifying the Italian locations Photograph Massimiliano Basegni depicted in Carry Me Home Florence, Italy, 2011 Photograph Frances Mocnik

Frances Mocnik Florence, Italy, 1965—2011 From the series Carry Me Home C-type print 95 x 34 cm

Frances Mocnik Idrija pri Baci, Slovenia, 1944—2011 From the series Carry Me Home C-type print, 95 x 34 cm

Frances Mocnik Idrija pri Baci, Slovenia, 1958—2011 From the series Carry Me Home C-type print 95 x 34 cm

Frances Mocnik Florence, Italy 1963—2011 From the series Carry Me Home C-type print 95 x 34 cm

Frances Mocnik Florence, Italy 1965—2011 From the series Carry Me Home C-type print 95 x 34 cm

Frances Mocnik Gorizia, Italy 1965—2011 From the series Carry Me Home C-type print 95 x 34 cm

Frances Mocnik Idrija pri Baci, Slovenia 1972—2011 From the series Carry Me Home C-type print 95 x 34 cm

Frances Mocnik Darwin, Australia 1970—2011 From the series Carry Me Home C-type print 95 x 34 cm

Frances Mocnik Darwin, Australia 1965—2011 From the series Carry Me Home C-type print 95 x 34 cm

Frances Mocnik Darwin, Australia 1967—2011 From the series Carry Me Home C-type print 95 x 34 cm

55 All my father’s houses

‘In every photograph we retain possession of what is no longer ours: not just a past but a certain place in history.’ 75

All my father’s houses: a catalogue by a builder’s daughter (2011–2014) is built upon the scaffolding of a childhood memory. The memories are nostalgic remnants of experience, etched into consciousness by the continual rehearsal of the family narrative. The subjects are houses that I no longer posses however, through memory, I remain connected to them and they continue to inform my sense of place and belonging.

Canberra is the place and context of this work and the houses depicted are located in the Tuggeranong Valley. For the past thirty years these houses have existed only in memory—their exact locations lost with the destruction of family archives and absent from official records. Through memory-work I have succeeded in identifying the location of 30 houses. At the time of writing some 30 remain lost. While these houses would complete my catalogue, their presence, through absence, points to two ideas firstly, Derrida’s account that an archive is never closed, and, secondly, that this work is not the pursuit of a definitive archive, but rather an active performance of memory as processed through an engagement with art.

For most people, a house is something you search for however, within my family it has always been something you build. My father, Ivan Mocnik, together with my mother Anna, built approximately 60 houses in Canberra. This personal memory of building connects me not only to a geographical place but to to a largely overlooked period of construction and architectural history within the ACT. The period of enquiry is 1978— 1991and during these years my family engaged in the practice of speculative building.76

75 Buchler, Ghost Stories: Stray Thoughts on Photography and Film, p.105 76 Speculative or ‘Spec’ building is the process where an independent builder (sole trader or small business) would buy a single block of land at government auction, build a house of their own design on it and speculate on being able to sell it for a profit. Ward, Assessment of Garden City Planning Principles in the ACT, p.25

Taken 34 years apart, the two images shown above depict the same house. The larger, titled Block and Section 17/224, is drawn from the series All my father’s houses: a catalogue by a builder’s daughter (2011 – 2014), while the smaller, a contact proof depicting the house’s original build, forms part of the series HomeWork (2011) – see page 34 for extended discussion. Shown together, they evidence the physical trace that registers in the images as the time in between memory and the present.

57 The houses in question are not quaint, nor are they nostalgic in a romantic way. They are first-home-buyer homes and their construction dovetails a tight budget to the ambition of acquiring a piece of the ‘Great Australian Dream’.77 Working within these constraints, the houses were designed as single story, timber-framed brick structures formed upon the sound foundations of a solid concrete slab. Windows predominantly faced north and were avoided on west-facing facades. Eaves were of a suitable length to simultaneously shade windows during summer yet allow the lower arcing winter sun access to warm the home.

This simple solar technique demonstrates an intuitive response in how best to dwell in a new country. In being attuned to the specificities of place my parents offer a counterpoint to the well-voiced view that migrants bring with them an aesthetic connection to their homeland—which is in turn— expressed in the homes they build.78

The experience of looking closely at the place one finds oneself in is a process I have inherited from my parents. The significance of this relationship to place began to surface as a point of conscious enquiry in 2003, when, I was commissioned to photograph the Pritzker prize-winning Australian architect Glenn Murcutt. Together we journeyed to Arnhem Land, a location chosen by Murcutt and one that features in other avenues of my family narrative. As Murcutt sat beneath the ledge at Ubir rock, he mused on the inspiration that he draws form the natural landscape, specifically sites used by Indigenous Australians for shelter. He described the over-hang under which he perched and its relationship to sun and shade and its passive solar properties. This discussion evoked memories of my migrant parents’ intuitive integration of passive solar design and surprisingly, here in Kakadu, notions of place, memory and journey converged and in some yet-to-be-expressed way I felt simultaneously remote, yet in place, and so very close to home.

77 The Great Australian Dream is the desire for ownership of a detached house on a quarter acre block and the belief that owning a home can lead to a better life and security. Lewis, Suburban Backlash: The Battle for the Word’s Most Livable City, p.61 78 Papastergiadis, Dialogues in the Diasporas: Essays and Conversations on Cultural Identity, p.11

Glen Murcutt, Ubir Rock, Kakadu, 2003 Frances Mocnik for Australian Geographic magazine Issue 81, p106.

59 Lucy Lippard writes that the ‘lure of the local is not always about home as an expressive place, a place of origin and return. Sometimes it is about the illusion of home’.79 Like my family narrative, the houses in this work have for the past 30 years resided in memory. These ‘houses of memory’ connect me to journeys of my past and anchor me to a specific time and place within the temporality of a mobile migrant experience.

Val Williams, in the exhibition catalogue ‘Who’s Looking at the Family?’ also suggests that the concept of home ‘is perhaps, more than anything, a system of memories’.80 This psychological place of belonging is again echoed by Alain de Botton, who suggests that ‘our homes do not have to offer us permanent occupancy or store our clothes to merit the name. To speak of home in relation to a building is simply to recognise its harmony with our prized internal song’.81

Do Ho Suh is a Korean artist whose evocations of home encompass similar questions of childhood memory, home as a mode of belonging, and home as a material and phenomenologically portable notion. Driven by a sense of loss and longing Suh journeyed back to Seoul to take detailed measurements of his family home. On returning to New York he fabricated a life-sized replica of the house from translucent silk. When exhibited this material evocation of childhood memory (and connection to place) floats overhead and suggests a memory experience, yet it can be packed into a suitcase and easily transported from place to place. This suggested mobility of place is further expressed in the work’s ever-expanding title, where locations are continually added as the work is exhibited: Seoul Home/L.A. Home/New York Home/ Baltimore Home/London Home/Seattle Home. The influence of this work on mine is through the notion of taking possession, through representation of an enduring childhood connection to place and belonging. In my work I use photography to collect images of the houses that, like Suh’s family home, anchor me to a geographical place in the world.

79 Lippard, Lure of the local: sense of place in a multicentered society, p.23 80 Williams, Who’s Looking at the Family, p.66 81 de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness, p.107

60 In 2003 Suh produced another portable structure, this time a life-size representation of his New York flat. When exhibited, 348 West 22nd St, connects to the ground and forms a counter point to his suspended Seoul Home. Together they symbolise a particular mobility, one of departures and returns, that, as described by Jennifer Johung in Replacing Home, ‘arc forward and back across both specific sites and times’.82 These structures are Suh’s expression of connections between two residences and the traversing of the distance between, back and forth from place to place. They are physical manifestations of home that represent the experiences within and ‘specific moments of contact with the two structures as projected back in memory, carried out over time, and opened up to a new public in each of their various exhibitions’.83

The portability of place as evoked in Suh’s structures of memory can similarly be seen operating within All my father’s houses; a catalogue by a builder’s daughter. In making my father’s houses portable (through representation) I now bring large material structures into contact with each other and with other places, past and present. This process, as expressed through the work of Suh, is shown to project back in memory while at the same time creating new places as activated through public exhibition and collective memory.

Like Suh, I also returned to my childhood home in search of a mode of belonging. My engagement of the home was as an archival source that provoked a negotiation with memory and resulted in memory-work. To that effect the information I have gathered has been accepted as remembered record where accuracy is implied. Through this process I have located 30 houses, the others at the time of writing, remain lost.

82 Johung, Relacing Home, From Primordial Hut to Digital Network in Contemporary Art, p.168 83 ibid, p.168

Do Ho Suh, Seoul Home/L.A. Home/New York Home/Baltimore Home/ London Home/Seattle Home, 1999 Silk; 378.5 x 609.6 x 600.6 cm Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Do Ho Suh, 348 West 22nd st, Apt, A, New York, NY 10011. 2000 Transparent nylon; 245 x 430 x 690 cm, edition of 3

63 Enquires into official archives (Land and titles office ACT, the ACT Planning and Land Authority and the National Library of Australia) failed to reveal any record of the 60 odd houses built in the ACT by my father. This archival failure necessitated a turn to memory work. Through detailed conversations with my mother we were able to recall the suburbs in which the houses are situated, the addresses of three houses, and importantly, my mother remembered and located of one set of original house plans. These plans lead to the drafting firm – JAB Drafting. Unfortunately, they too, had disposed of the original plans. Fortunately a ledger detailing the companies work remained, and from this we identified the location of some 30 houses.

As I was living in Sydney while producing this thesis, my fieldwork required multiple trips back to Canberra across a two-year period. To further complicate the production process, photography was only undertaken during winter when deciduous trees shed their leaves, increasing the visibility of the houses: and on and days of full cloud or fog that served to limit the scene luminance range.84 Effectively a double action, cloud and fog revealed detail while simultaneously obscuring the sky and surrounding landscape. This serves to mobilize a viewer’s attention to the house while still hinting at the context beyond.

Conceptually, the houses were to occupy the centre third of a 6x6” frame and to be canopied by grey sky and anchored by similarly grey road. Where possible, the front façade would be parallel to the film plane. The first few houses complied willingly with this methodology; it was the forth that presented challenges. This house had grown and now included extensive additions, effectively doubling its footprint and altering the in-frame ratio. I responded intuitively and, as in my photojournalistic practice, I allowed the composition to be guided by the subject—the house would dictate the frame. Almost subconsciously, I moved backward until the house, complete with all additions, was framed in its entirety.

84 The scene luminance range in Australia is typically high creating dark shadows when highlights are correctly exposed for. I employ fog and cloud to diffuse and soften sunlight as one would employ a soft box within a studio setting. Light, diffracted and bouncing in this way has the effect of opening up (revealing information) in areas of shadow that would otherwise be dark and void of detail.

64 My childhood memories recall images of well built brick homes, perfect in every detail and standing on cleared blocks of land—visible. Thirty years on I discovered that many of the houses appear to be hiding, peeking out from behind shrubs or partly visible over fences as though they do not want to be seen. Some sport the decorative appliqués inflicted upon them by subsequent owners, while others—alarmingly—revealed a considerable amount of neglect.

In How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand draws our attention to the fact that houses always grow. Additions from grand extensions to small, sneaky acquisitions of annexed space happen over time. My father’s houses have also grown, as have their gardens, and it is this physical trace that registers in my images as the space in-between memory and the present.

All my father’s houses: a catalogue by a builder’s daughter reveals the temporality of place and represents a significant chapter in my mobile migrant journey. Importantly, it hints at the multiple histories that place has the potential to reveal, while simultaneously suggesting futures that are yet to come. In this way, it demonstrates that place, like home, is always becoming.

Artist’s diary, 2011 – 2015.

Anna Mocnik, memory-work. Canberra, 2011 Photograph Frances Mocnik

67 68

All my father’s houses: a catalogue by a builder’s daughter

The following 30 photographs and 30 blank panels comprise the work All my father’s houses: a catalogue by a builder’s daughter (2011 - 2014). As documented in Appendix 1, this work has been produced for exhibition in the form of a 4 meter concertina artist’s book.

______

69 -.~-

41 42

43 44

45 46

70 48

71 53 54

57 52

72 60

63 64

73 65

67 68

74 71

75 76

75 77 78

79 80

83 84

87 88

77 B9 90

31 92

78 95 ~------~96

97 98

79 Conclusion

I began this discussion with the suggestion that a sense of place is created through a combination of human activity and the processing of these experiences through memory. To explain this connection to place, I used Augé’s theories to geographically connect to the real world. From this physically rooted position I engaged with Lippard to cement the role of human agency and memory in the construction of the local.

As a migrant, my family narrative is one of multiple departures from and arrivals to place. While these journeys are both voluntary and forced, historical and ongoing, the common and prevailing theme is a disconnection from place and loss of home. Augé has argued that this type of mobility, as connected to his theories of supermodernity, results in the waning of the specificity of place. I have challenged this viewpoint and offered my own mobile migrant experience in support of the idea that it is through the proliferation of supermodernity, and in being able to experience one place next to another, that the local is thrown into high relief.

In fact, it is mobility itself and my experience within it that has forged my understanding of the local. I share this sentiment with artist Simryn Gill who, through her art, explores the process of migration, moving between places and notions of displacement through her art. In producing work of this kind, she seeks to make sense of the world. These process of searching for meaning, along with a shared interest in place as a lived experience of belonging, informs my own investigations into place, migration and memory.

Central to my work are notions of home as an emotionally invested site of lived experience. My work finds traction in Di Stefano’s suggestion that home can be considered as a structure of activity around which a narrative of belonging can be constructed.

Sites of lived experience and the use of the land to connect the past to the present are points of enquiry and ideas that I share with Anne Ferran. In photographing present day places, I too re-interpret histories of place and question the gaps and silences found in official records. In establishing these counter-archives, I bring focused

80 attention to alternative narratives of place and the people who’s histories have formed them.

My methodology as an image-maker has found a connection in the conceptual underpinnings of the archival artists discussed by Foster and Enwezor. Like these artists, I am interested in the actuality of loss or displacement of historical information. More specifically, my interest is in the formation of personal archives and the effect of photography in shaping history and memory.

Methodologically I find Taryn Simon’s approach to the systematic engagement of photography and the archival form compelling; this obsession is due to my own archival disappointments. While failures in both memory and the archive have robbed me of the comprehensive catalogue that I set out to achieve, the process of forming counter- archives has offered up the possibility of home as a system of memories and the notion that the performance of memory is, like an archive, a place in itself.

All my father’s houses; a catalogue by a builder’s daughter began as the desire to give visual form to childhood memories of place. These memories anchor me to geographical place (Canberra) and the 60-odd houses that my father built there. Having experienced the loss of family archives to natural disasters and other causes, my imagistic desires were motivated by the fear that one day these memories might be lost and with them an important connection to place.

As expressed in this thesis, my work is haunted by the loss of personal archives and and the silence of official records. This actuality necessitated a turn to memory-work and the results are a negotiation between memory, photography, place and the archive. Through photography and its ability to inscribe an image of the world, I have been able to take possession by representation of these large material objects that have—for the past 30 years—existed only as memories. These photographs provide a location for the production of memory and the representation of the past as imaged by the present. Like the archival artists described by Foster and Enwezor, my interrogation of the archive has exposed gaps and produced a new counter-archive which, like my

81 mobile migrant life, is portable and open to new interpretations and connections with places yet to come.

In today’s digital age, we are already witness to the proliferation and use of digital storage solutions. Unlike traditional archives, which have been shown to be fallible, digital storage promises security of data and offers power of consignment to the individual. Memory, however, will continue to remain fragile and it is what we do with our memories—and how we interrogate or activate archives—that will continue to determine what is and isn’t remembered.

82 List of illustrations

1. Paul and Frances Mocnik, c1979, Canberra ACT p.xi Photographer Ivan Mocnik

2. Canberra House during the 2003 bush fire p.11 Canberra, Australia, 2003 Photographer Anna Mocnik

3. Darwin House after Cyclone Tracy p.12 Darwin, Australia, 1974 Photographer Ivan Mocnik

4. Slovenia House during spring floods p.13 Idrija pri Baci, Slovenia, c1960 Photographer unknown

5. Simryn Gill, p.24 Dalam, No.39, 2001 C-print, 23.5 cm x 23.5 cm

6. Simryn Gill, p.24 Dalam, No. 227, 2001 C-print, 23.5 cm x 23.5 cm

7. Simryn Gill, p.24 Dalam, No.162, 2001 C-print, 23.5 cm x 23.5 cm

8. Simryn Gill, p.24 Dalam, No. 226, 2001 C-print, 23.5 cm x 23.5 cm

9. Simryn Gill, p.25 Dalam, 2001 Installation view at the Tate Modern 23.5 cm x 23.5 cm

10. Anne Ferran p.28 From the series Lost to Worlds 2008 Digital print on aluminium 120 x120 cm

83 11. Anne Ferran p.28 From the series Lost to Worlds 2008 Digital print on aluminium 120 x120 cm

12. Anne Ferran p.29 From the series Lost to Worlds 2008 Digital print on aluminium 120 x120 cm

13. Anne Ferran p.29 From the series Lost to Worlds 2008 Digital print on aluminium 120 x120 cm

14. Taryn Simon p.32 A Living man declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII, Chapter 1, 2011 Deatil of three panel installation 231.4 x 301.7cm

15. Taryn Simon p.33 A Living man declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII, Instalation view, Amine Rech Gallery, Paris, 2012

16. Frances Mocnik p.37 HomeWork, Paul aged 8, 2011 C-print, 45 cm x 53 cm

17. Frances Mocnik p.38 HomeWork, Carpenter’s Pencil, 2011 C-print, 29 cm x 37 cm

18. Frances Mocnik p.39 HomeWork, Tapestry House, 2011 C-print, 29 cm x 37 cm

19. Frances Mocnik p.40 HomeWork, Contact Proof Home: Blocak & Section 17/224, 2011 C-print, 29 cm x 37 cm

20. Dear Photograph p.43 Screen grab: www.dearphotograph.com Sourced December 6, 2014

84 21. Historical family photographs, as selected by Anna Mocnik, p.45 awaiting return to their sites of origin. Sydney, Australia, 2011

22. Frances Mocnik working on location in Slovenia, 2011 p.45 Photograph Massimiliano Basegni

23. Dr Alessandro Basegni identifying the Italian locations in my p.45 family photographs Florence, Italy, 2011

24. Frances Mocnik p.46 Florence, Italy 1965—2011 From the series Carry Me Home C-Type print 95 x 34 cm

25. Frances Mocnik p.47 Idrija pri Baci, Slovenia 1944—2011 From the series Carry Me Home C-Type print 95 x 34 cm

26. Frances Mocnik p.48 Idrija pri Baci, Slovenia 1958—2011 From the series Carry Me Home C-Type print 95 x 34 cm

27. Frances Mocnik p.49 Florence, Italy 1963—2011 From the series Carry Me Home C-Type print 95 x 34 cm

28. Frances Mocnik p.50 Florence, Italy 1965—2011 From the series Carry Me Home C-Type print 95 x 34 cm

29. Frances Mocnik p.51 Goricia, Italy 1965—2011 From the series Carry Me Home C-Type print 95 x 34 cm

85 30. Frances Mocnik p.52 Idrija pri Baci, Slovenia 1972—2011 From the series Carry Me Home C-Type print 95 x 34 cm

31. Frances Mocnik p.53 Darwin, Australia 1970—2011 From the series Carry Me Home C-Type print 95 x 34 cm

32. Frances Mocnik p.54 Darwin, Australia 1965—2011 From the series Carry Me Home C-Type print 95 x 34 cm

33. Frances Mocnik p.55 Darwin, Australia 1967—2011 From the series Carry Me Home C-Type print 95 x 34 cm

34. Frances Mocnik p.57 From the series: All my father’s houses: a catalogue by a builder’s daughter (2011–14), Block and Section 17/224 Canberra, Australia

35. Frances Mocnik p.57 From the series: HomeWork (2011) Contact Proof Home: Block and Section 17/224 Canberra, Australia, c1980 Contact proof on RC paper

36. Frances Mocnik p.59 Glen Murcutt at Ubir Rock, Kakadu, Northern Territory, Australia. Published Australian Geographic Magazine Issue 81, p106.

37. Do Ho Suh p.62 Seoul Home/L.A. Home/Hew York Home/Baltimore Home/ London Home/Seattle HomL.A. Home, 1999 Silk; 378.5 x 609.6 x 600.6 cm

86 38. Do Ho Suh p.63 348 West 22nd St, Apt, A, New York, NY 10011, 2000 Transparent nylon; 245 x 430 x 690 cm. Edition of 3

39. Artist’s diary, 2011 p.66 Canberra, Australia

40. Frances Mocnik p.63 Anna Mocnik memory work, 2011 Canberra, Australia

41. Block & Section 28/829 p.70 42. Block & Section unknown #1 p.70 43. Block & Section 28/821 p.70 44. Block & Section 7/6 p.70 45. Block & Section unknown #2 p.70 46. Block & Section unknown #3 p.70

47. Block & Section 24/60 p.71 48. Block & Section unknown #4 p.71 49. Block & Section 59/2 p.71 50. Block & Section 3/581 p.71 51. Block & Section 14/37 p.71 52. Block & Section unknown #5 p.71

53. Block & Section unknown #6 p.72 54. Block & Section unknown #7 p.72 55. Block & Section 59/24 p.72 56. Block & Section 58/24 p.72 57. Block & Section unknown #8 p.72 58. Block & Section unknown #9 p.72

59. Block & Section 37/826 p.73 60. Block & Section unknown #10 p.73 61. Block & Section unknown #11 p.73 62. Block & Section 5/767 p.73 63. Block & Section unknown #12 p.73 64. Block & Section unknown #13 p.73

65. Block & Section 24/60 p.74 66. Block & Section 4/824 p.74 67. Block & Section unknown #14 p.74 68. Block & Section unknown #15 p.74 69. Block & Section 7/264 p.74 70. Block & Section 4/823 p.74

71. Block & Section unknown #16 p.75 72. Block & Section 27/824 p.75 73. Block & Section 66/15 p.75 74. Block & Section 15/59 p.75

87 75. Block & Section unknown #17 p.75 76. Block & Section unknown #18 p.75

77. Block & Section unknown #19 p.76 78. Block & Section 45/7 p.76 79. Block & Section 6/67 p.76 80. Block & Section unknown #20 p.76 81. Block & Section unknown #21 p.76 82. Block & Section 6/716 p.76

83. Block & Section 17/224 p.77 84. Block & Section unknown #22 p.77 85. Block & Section unknown #23 p.77 86. Block & Section 6/12 p.77 87. Block & Section 44/32 p.77 88. Block & Section unknown #24 p.77

89. Block & Section unknown #25 p.78 90. Block & Section 19/40 p.78 91. Block & Section unknown #26 p.78 92. Block & Section 43/7 p.78 93. Block & Section 25/767 p.78 94. Block & Section unknown #27 p.78

95. Block & Section unknown #28 p.79 96. Block & Section 18/54 p.79 97. Block & Section 17/224 p.79 98. Block & Section unknown #29 p.79 99. Block & Section unknown #30 p.79 100. Block & Section 8/32 p.79

88 Appendix

This appendix lists works exhibited in fulfilment of the studio component of this MFA and provides photographic documentation of the exhibition.

Exhibition Title: All my father’s houses: a catalogue by a builder’s daughter. Venue: A+D Space, University of Art and Design, Sydney, Australia.

List of artworks:

HomeWork (2011)

Paul Aged 8 C-type print front face mounted with acrylic 45 x 55cm

Tapestry House, C-type print front face mounted with acrylic 37cm x 29 cm

Carpenter’s Pencil, C-type print front face mounted with acrylic 37cm x 29 cm

Contact Proof Home, C-type print front face mounted with acrylic 37cm x 29 cm

Carry Me Home (2011)

Idrija pri Bachi, Slovenia, 1944 – 2011 C-type print 95 cm x 34 cm

Idrija pri Baci, Slovenia 1972 – 2011 C-type print 95 cm x 34 cm

Florence, Italy, 1965 – 2011 C-type print 95 cm x 34 cm

89 Darwin, Australia, 1970 – 2011 C-type print 95 cm x 34 cm

All my father’s houses: a catalogue by a builder’s daughter (2011 – 2014)

Artists book, 42 cm x 4000cm (when extended) containing 30 photographic images and 30 blank cells that comprise the series All my father’s houses: a catalogue by a builder’s daughter (2011 – 2014).

Presented in concertina book format and displayed on a custom plinth of powder coated mild steel and timber ply top, (4200cm x 1450cm).

Epson archival inkjet paper with Epson archival inks.

Wall Mural Untitiled - historical view of Tuggeranong Valley, ACT. Adhesive vinyl 2100 cm x 6000 cm Frances Mocnik c 1989

All my father’s houses; a catalogue by a builder’s daugher. Instalation view A+D Space, Art and Design, UNSW 2015

Artist’s book – All my father’s houses; a catalogue by a builder’s daugher (2011-2014). A+D Space, Art and Design, UNSW 2015.

All my father’s houses; a catalogue by a builder’s daugher. Wall mural detail. A+D Space, Art and Design, UNSW 2015.

Detail view showing Carry me Home, Idrija pri Baci, Slovenia 1944-2001, in the exhibitiion All my father’s houses; a catalogue by a builder’s daugher (2011). Instalation view A+D Space, Art and Design, UNSW 2015.

All my father’s houses; a catalogue by a builder’s daugher (2011). Instalation view A+D Space, Art and Design, UNSW 2015.

HomeWork (2011) Instalation view A+D Space, Art and Design, UNSW 2015.

97 Bibliography

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100

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102 Jeffrey, M. A sense of place in the world; Inside or out, Simryn Gill’s image are all about being there, whatever ‘there’ is, The Herald, Glasgow (UK), 18 July 2003

Kuhn, A. Photography and cultural memory: a methodological Exploration, Visual Studies, Vol, 22. No. 3, December, 2007, 283-292

Lager Vestber, N. Archival Value, Photographies, 1:1, 2008, 49-65

Martin-Jones, D and Soledad Montañez, M. Personal Museums of Memory: The Recovery of Lost (National) Histories in the Uruguayan Documentaries Al pie del árbol blanco and El cículo. Latin American Perspectives, 2013, 40:73

McSpedden, S. Anne Ferran: The Forgotten Archive, Eyeline Contemporary Visual Culture, Vol 71, 2010, 33-35

Nora, P. Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire. Representations 26, 1989, 7-24

O’Brian, M. Mum’s Got To Sell The House, Photographies, 3:2, 2010, 189-203

Oksman, T. Mourning the Family Album, aa/b: Auto Biography Studies, Volume 24, No2, 2009, 235-248

Saegert, S. The Role of Housing in the Experience of Dwelling, Human Behaviour and Environment, Vol 8, 1985, 287-309

Sekulla, A. The Body and the Archive. October, Vol 39, Winter 1986, 3-64

Sixsmith, J. The Meaning of Home: an exploratory study of environmental experience, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 1986, Vol 6, 281-298

103 Exhibition catalogues:

Annear, J. Photography & Place, Australian Landscape Photography 1970’s until now, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2011

Simryn Gill : selected work, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2002

Your place or mine? : Fiona Foley, Simryn Gill, Institue of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2002

Jenkins, W. New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape. Rochester International Museum of Photography. George Eastman House, 1975

Electronic resources:

ABC Arts, Here art grows on trees, Simryn Gill at the Venice Biennale. http://www.abc.net.au/arts/stories/s3770944.htm, sourced December 2014

ABC 702 Friday 17 October 2014 http://www.abc.net.au/newsradio/content/s4108997.htm accessed October, 2014

Anwandter, Frames of Mind: Photography, Memory and Identity, CUREJ Electronic Journal, http://repository.upenn.edu/curej/39 accessed July 2013

Coleman, S. Ann Ferran. Review posted 08 Feb 2014 http://artguide.com.au/articles- page/show/anne-ferran-2/ accessed October 2014

Ferran, A. Anne Ferran (Art Forum) eprints.utas.edu/9180/1/anne_ferran_15_8_08.mp4 accessed December 2014

Oxford Dictionaries http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/home accessed October, 2014

Stills Gallery, Anne Ferran – Lost to Worlds http://www.stillsgallery.com.au/exhibitions/2009/index.php?obj_id=ferran

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