Know Thy Neighbour Residency: Makaela Rowe-Fox with City of Stirling #1

Sep 4

Makaela Rowe-Fox reflects on her Know Thy Neighbour #4 residency project and collaboration with the Ishar Multicultural Women’s Health Services and Dianella College Education Support Centre. Through microscope-making workshops and bush excursions in partnership with the City of Stirling, Makaela and the participants explored relationships with the non-human ecology around us.

The first stage of my residency has been all about relationship. Forming new relationships with the communities in Mirrabooka and Dianella, discovering new connections and rekindling forgotten ones with the non-human ecology all around us.

Many activities have been planned, others are more spontaneous. The library’s Mahjong club invite me to have tea with them, I unexpectantly run into Eram and we walk to the library together. Friends and familiar acquaintances I didn’t know lived in Mirrabooka keep approaching me, excited and curious about a new local art project. There is a deep sense of community here and I feel endlessly grateful to have been so kindly welcomed.

I meet with a group of women through Ishar Multicultural Women’s Health Services every week, as well as two classrooms of young people enrolled in Dianella College Education Support Centre. Across four weeks, I facilitate a series of workshops called ‘Life in Detail: Macro Photography and Video’.

***

In the workshops I provide participants with home-made microscopes, which we use to explore the world around us. We make small things big, and sometimes, make big things small.

The home-made microscopes are built with two magnifying lenses inside PVC pipe held together by a makeshift frame. On one end, cheap phones are attached looking through our DIY lenses creating a macro camera effect.

Due to the curved lenses, the images we see through our microscope-cameras are inverted; literally turning our perspective upside down.

Some discoveries include the different textures of clothes, dirt, bark and plants in the Dianella ESC vegetable garden.

When handed the microscope for the first time, one young person cries out, ‘take a picture of my eye!’

In Mirrabooka, we look for ants, find moss between the sandstone bricks outside, and press our lenses against flowers outside the library.

Each group is tasked with filming one object of interest and bringing it back to the collective. Assembling our videos together, we create a kind of ‘Jenga tower’ of video perspectives through our microscope-screens.

We re-arrange the structure of the screens and discussed how our artwork changes with each shift.

***

What do the microscope-camera images remind you of?

In Mirrabooka, we map the associations we make with our microscope-camera photographs.

Moon

Earth

Womb

Ears

Eyes

Eyes become our hands

(to reach the moon)

The moon becomes an unexpected and significant association early on. In the Muslim faith, the moon plays an important role in marking the start of Ramadan, as well as each month, and the crescent moon in particular is widely understood as a symbol of Islam. We discuss how, for some members of our collective, looking at the moon through a microscope can allow us to be spiritually and culturally connected. In a room full of different languages, cultures and religions, the moon has become an anchoring symbol for us all.

***

Walking Cottonwood Nature Reserve with our microscopes, we talk a lot about Balga trees, kangaroo paws and time. When we don’t know a particular species or fact, we avoid using our phones, sitting with the uncertainty and embracing the collective and diverse knowledges we have together.

I ask the groups,

What is older than you?

What is younger than you?

We decide that many plants and animals in the reserve are both older and younger than us. We talk about the kangaroo paw. Maybe an individual kangaroo paw is younger than us, but generations of the plant have lived here for hundreds if not thousands of years, making it far, far older.

We start to think and feel in deep time.

The Balga trees inspire much reverence. Their old age and connection to Country is felt by all groups walking Cottonwood Reserve.

I hope to revisit the reserve as a collective soon as we begin co-creating the final artwork.

Images courtesy of Regan Flynn.

More about Makaela’s project.

More about the Know Thy Neighbour #4: Gesturesproject.

More about arts in City of Stirling and Ishar Multicultural Women’s Health Services.

Stay up to date by subscribing to SPACED’s monthly email newsletter, and following SPACED on Facebook and Instagram.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.