Spaced4- Lake Grace Artist Residency 2021

Spaced 4: Rural Utopias, Jo Darbyshire Lake Grace Residency Sept/Oct/Nov 2021
I spent the first ten years of my life in Lake Grace (1961-1970) but have not been back since I left- so this residency was an opportunity to personally reconnect with the landscape of my childhood and with people in the area who remembered my parents, and me, as a child. It is also a reckoning of sorts- how did the landscape and culture- shape my life?
I have vivid memories of the town in the ‘60s and growing up there was a happy time. My father was the Shell Service Station Rep and I accompanied him on his truck, delivering petrol and water- all around the district. As a child I took in the landscape and the people- I remember the poverty of some small landholdings and the power of the salt lakes- the largest collection of salt lakes in Australia.
My mother, from Perth, had come to the town as a primary school teacher before she married my father, who had also come from Perth. While it was an extremely ‘white’ settler community, with no Aboriginal residents, It was also the ‘60s and the small Wheatbelt town was a thriving, growing community; new young people were drawn to the town for work and included nurses, bakers, railway workers, goldmine workers and those who were there to build new, infrastructure projects: a Swimming pool (1966), a Drive-in (1967) and a new concrete CBH wheatbin- built by Yugoslav immigrant families (Nino Buratovic) that travelled the Wheatbelt in caravans (1968/9). They were ‘Utopian’ years for farmers and townspeople- the high rainfall gave a false impression of the drought years to come. My father and a few friends took advantage of the high water levels; they bought a small boat- and began to water-ski. This was a popular sport in nearby Narrogin and Dumbleyung and ski show teams came to Lake Grace to perform regattas in the lake. I remember watching them water skiing through hoops of fire. They were the exotic symbol of modernisation and progress. The first two weeks of my residency (6-19 September) saw me re-introduced to the general community through the amazing women that run the Lake Grace Regional Art Space. For a small country town Lake Grace contains a relatively large number of professional artists with tertiary art school training and experience. Tania Spencer and Kerrie Argent, both Curtin Uni graduates bought and set up a large gallery/studio in what was the old 4-Square supermarket, in the main street. This space supports professional visual arts practice throughout the Wheatbelt and they arranged an afternoon tea and an evening public talk to introduce the project to the local community.  Artist and curator Michele Slarke, my mentor for this project, and her mother Annie Slarke, took me on an early morning walk to view the spectacular wildflowers on various remnant pieces of bush that have been saved from farming/clearing, and drought. It is serendipitous that this year has been a year of high rainfall. In fact the Rural Utopia theme particularly resonates, as after the record rains- it is hoped to be a bumper season for crops- if the “frost doesn't kill them”. “Parts of southern Western Australia have recorded their wettest-ever winter, while others topped 20-year records. The Bureau of Meteorology's (BOM) revealed that Lake Grace – an area declared water deficient in recent years due to climate change – recorded its wettest winter on record with 167 millimetres, smashing the 1998 record by 30mm… Lake Grace farmer Ross Chapple said this year's winter felt like one from decades past. "In June and July it was feeling a bit like the old days," he said." Hasn’t been like that in many, many years.” John Dobson and Tyne Logan, ABC Great Southern, 1 Sept 2021 The rare times when winter rainfall fills the lakes, has an immediate impact on Lake Grace. Not only is the land prosperous but the bush is also renewed. Wildflowers and local species are seen to recover from the drought and are appreciated by locals and tourists. In a sense this renewal of the land also affects peoples mental and emotional spirits and ‘culture’ is more readily celebrated. A ‘utopian’ optimism replaces stoic pessimism.  Again this year some locals are water-skiing on Cemetery Lake, closest to town. This shallow, and salty lake, cut in two by the road leading into town, was the first water body that encountered as a child, and learnt to swim and play in. I took a paddleboard out on it and was able to spend a morning immersed in its solitary beauty. The population of the town has decreased since the ‘60s. Where the school had 300 children then- now it has 100. Many of the old farming families have stayed but the town population is more transitory. I have started painting in the studio space, mostly at night, when the space is empty. During the day there are many visitors from the community including some of the participants from the painting workshop I held on the middle weekend of the 2-week residency. This was the first of 3 painting workshops with 14 participants that come from Lake Grace, Narrogin and Newdegate.
The participants range in experience; some are professional artists already and some have never painted with oils before. Their ages range from several senior people in their late 70s, to young people in their 20s. In the first workshop we discussed the project, and the process of working with oil paints on large-scale canvases (150 x 150 cm), and ideas about how to explore abstract techniques in relation to the theme Rural Utopias.
My Optus phone doesn’t work in Lake Grace- I am borrowing a Telstra phone for emergency calls and the Internet is only available to me during the day from 9-3. Its been a little disconcerting to be without city privileges, but its also means I understand the past experience of place and distance, just a little better.

  The values of residencies such as this one are that they allow the artist to start to understand the complex nature of the environment they are embedded into. One can only hope to understand a small part after only 6 weeks.

It was only on the third workshop with participants from the painting workshop that I felt I was able to ask to discuss with them the shocking statistic quoted by Tony Hughes d’Aeth in his book Like Nothing on Earth- a Literary history of the Wheatbelt (2017) in which he says that 50 million acres of bush were cleared by 1970 and that only 7percent of original vegetation remains. He further says that the central theme of any history of the WA Wheatbelt is ‘radical disappearance’, that it was a socio-ecological event of planetary significance; “The emergence of the Wheatbelt is not so much a product of human history but a violation and eradication of natural history”. Lake Grace people said that it was more like 11% left in the Lake Grace area and 36% over the shire- but this is still quite shocking. How to even begin to confront this reality as artists?.
My own work- which initially responded to the amazing wildflower season-stalled, after I read d’Aeth’s comments about Katherine Susannah Pritchard’s work and her description of how she had loved the wildflowers which came up on the soil cleared for crops! d’Aeth points out that  “there is a poignant belief that these wildflowers could persist in the face of continued ploughing. In reality, of course, this would be their last appearance before continued cultivation replaced them with the grain crops in the newly created farms. In this way, the full reality of natural destruction is disguised by romantic fallacy.” (d’Aeth, p161-2). He also talked about how Barbara York Main called the small pockets of natural environment left- ‘living museums’. Of course some artists in the southwest have attempted to question how the Wheatbelt is seen, but their often-close dependency on family or friends on already established farms, make it difficult terrain. While many people privately complain about the current farming methods that remove the last trees left in the paddock, nothing seems to be said publicly, or laws enforced that prohibit clearing. It is a national shame and not just a local one. Locals have a degree of pragmatism:“We can’t unclear the land, it will never be the way it was, time moves on. The mix of farming and conservation- If farmers strive to have healthy, abundant and live soils, nature wins too” Tania Spencer, Instagram post, Nov 2021 Tania and Darren Spencer took me out to visit Darren’s fathers’ farm- east of Lake King and right on the eastern edge of the Wheatbelt- against the rabbit-proof fence. It was opened up and cleared in the 1940s and during WWll- held Italian workers designated ‘aliens’ by the Government of the time. Some areas were cleared as late as the 1980’s.
I wanted to visit the farm of Brett and Renee Willcocks, who had tried ‘sustainable’ or organic farming practices in Lake Grace, in the past 15 years. I wasn't able to visit the farm but did speak to Brett who told me of the heartbreak he felt- having to return to normal farming practice as he had nearly gone broke and lost his farm. One problem was the lack of rainfall in the area- which made usual composting or other alternative farming practices very difficult.
The third Painting Workshop was held on the weekend of 13/14 November. This project aimed at supporting professional practice with the relatively large number of professional artists in the region. One objective was to complete a large-scale painting, using oil painting techniques, which explored a personal relationship to ideas around the ‘Rural Utopia’ theme. The timeframe supported a longer term learning opportunity rather than a one-off approach to a workshop. All 13 participants finished a work. Participants were: Lake Grace (7): Kerrie Argent, Jayne-Maree Argent, Tania Spencer, Anna Strevett, Judith A Stewart, Paula McIver, Genevieve Curtin, Newdegate (1): Melissa Cugley, Narrogin (3): Karen Keeley, Ned Crossley, Barbara Fletcher, Dumbleyung (1): Kerry Scally, Wagin (1): Joyce Contos.
I will be talking more with Michele Slarke, Tania Spencer and Kerrie Argent about what might happen with the paintings in 2022- with an exhibition either in the Lake Grace Artspace or AGWA. I am also hoping to continue with another workshop. The first oil painting I ever made was a portrait of my mother in Lake Grace when I was 8. Mum came home with the oil paints she had bought to do a class and I begged her to let me have a go. She sat for 2 hours in one of those Featherston canvas chairs-in the back yard- and I was hooked and that's when I knew what I wanted to do more than anything else. That experience had such a huge impact on the course of my life as an artist.
So, on the 10 November I was happy to hold a second workshop with 20 local kids from year 2/3 at Lake Grace School. The children attended the Artspace and worked on a 6 metre long canvas as a group project. They were exploring ideas about Lake Grace- the natural environment and sense of place.
It has been an amazing honour to revisit my childhood and to reflect on how ones childhood shapes ones life, in this residence in Lake Grace. I have been able to also look -as an adult - at the place, the people, the economy and the environment. It seems the optimism of my parents, who came to Lake Grace in the late 50’s /60’s has been replaced by a resilient commitment to create and maintain a viable, vibrant town - by the locals. Utopian years can be the difference between growth and decline for these small rural towns.
You can follow me on insta #lakegraceresidency #jodarbs

Read more https://www.spaced.org.au/spaced-latest/rural-utopias-residency-jo-darbyshire-in-lake-grace-3

on the Spaced WEBSITE

This project was commissioned by International Art Space as a part of the spaced 4: rural utopias program

SPACED 4: RURAL UTOPIAS

Spaced 4: rural utopias is a program centred on an artists’ exchange between international and Australian visual artists with regional and remote West Australian communities. The program will span three years (2019-21) and constitute the core of the fourth iteration of spaced, a recurring international program of context-responsive art, presented by International Art Space (IAS)  https://www.facebook.com/spacedias/

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