Susan Hauri-Downing & Tarsh Bates in Beverley
Artists: Susan Hauri-Downing (she/her) & Tarsh Bates (they/them), WA
Work: In progress
Location: Beverley, Western Australia
Community partner: Beverley Station Arts
About the Artists:
Based on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja / Southwestern Australia, Susan Hauri-Downing works at the intersections of social work and artistic methodologies. Her art practice focuses on bio-cultural diversity, ecological grief and loss and interspecies relationships. Based in Ubmeje Sápmi / Northern Sweden, Tarsh Bates is a transdisciplinary artist/researcher/educator interested in the aesthetics of interspecies relationships and queer ecologies. We collaborate on the Scents of Solastalgia project, which considers smell not only as a sensory experience but as a form of ecological memory. We explore how the smells around us change and how creating new smellscapes can foster a sense of agency and connection
Scents are produced by and cycle through land, bodies, water, atmosphere and time. We ask how smells connect us to place and how changes in smellscapes change connections to place. In consultation with community members and groups, we forage and scavenge stories and materials and using steam distillation, we collect scents of Beverley.
About the community partner:
Lovingly restored, the Old Railway Station sits in the heart of the rural town of Beverley (pop. 1700), on the Avon River, just 100 minutes east of Perth. What was the station master’s house is now an artist’s residency and the station has been lovingly restored to house the town’s art collection, which was begun in 1967 with bequests from Sir Claude Hotchin. The collection is open to the public Thurs-Sun with the help of artists-in-residence, in return for living in the station residence rent free. The surrounds have been transformed into a carriage garden and an impressive outdoor theatre built to cater for all types of performing arts.
Susan Hauri-Downing, Contact zones: soliciting the lip, 2014, digital photographic print on Hähnemuhle, 70x100cm.
