Cara Teusner-Gartland with Fremantle Buffalo Club and Vessel Contemporary
Artist: Cara Teusner-Gartland
Location: Fremantle Buffalo Club and The Naval Store, Fremantle
Project Partners: Vessel Contemporary and Fremantle Buffalo Club
Work In Progress: The project explores Fremantle Buffalo Club, a site known for shared activities and community work, to look at the power of empathy, wellbeing, and connection: a motion in a performance, a charitable act, the muscle memory of billiards stick and dart throwing, and the act of teaching this to a stranger, leaving with a friend. Cara will draw on the Club’s history and interview present members to inform a project that reflects the club’s identity and living history within the broader community of Fremantle.
About the artist:
Cara Teusner-Gartland is a multidisciplinary artist based in Walyalup/Fremantle. Her practice is rooted in community, place, and storytelling. Engaging with painting, drawing, textile, sculpture, installation, performance and sound, Cara documents and builds a holistic familiarity with sites and underlying local narratives. Her process for developing work often involves long dérives, collecting found and recycled materials, interviews, and archival research. Cara completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Curtin University in 2018, majoring in painting. She has worked extensively in gallery and public art installation, both locally and regionally. She has presented work for the Fremantle Biennale and Melville Midwinter Festival, and featured in exhibitions at PS Art Space, Lost Eden Creative, Old Customs House, Lawson Flats, and Goolugatup Heathcote.
About the project partners:
Vessel is an interdisciplinary exhibition space and contemporary arts organisation that explores and generates new ideas of change through art, creativity, experimentation and societal exchange.
At Vessel, they boldly declare themselves as the future and firmly believe in the power of contemporary art and creativity as catalysts for change. They support artistic and creative growth, nurturing early and mid-career artistic and curatorial practices. Vessel prioritises peer-to-peer learning and professional development to foster critical arts practices that dare to challenge the current political, environmental and societal norms.
Their home is at the Naval Store, a unique industrial space at the entryway to Walyalup, holds great significance in the historic, cultural and creative fabric of Fremantle. Vessel’s program highlights the importance of the arts to create dialogue and debate the relationship between art and society, reflecting on contemporary issues and challenges that we face as a community, both locally and internationally.
Fremantle Buffalo Club was once many scattered across the globe by the Antediluvian Order of Buffalos from the 1820s and would meet in the upper halls. The old order no longer run the club, but they continue to meet in the upper halls. The Buffalo Club pursues the aims it inherited from the order, to support social unity in all its dimensions.
Our particular club was established on the former site of the Madrid Restaurant in 1938 and was given over to general members in the 60s. The club rambled through the intervening years much unchanged in a changing city.
“The Buff” seeks a culture of friendship and has been a point of solidarity for maritime workers and Freo's grassroots community. In recent years, this has included an influx of new members from the music community and the club regularly hosts live music events.
CⒶrdi (detail), Cara Teusner-Gartland, 2021, Mixed Media, 28 x 31 x 9.5cm.
