Exhibition: Transcriptions 1998 West Space, Melbourne
Transcriptions, (1998), was my first exhibition with West Space. Historical records relating to the lives and conditions of Chinese miners on the goldfields of Victoria and New South Wales provided the basis for this installation work. It was part of the Penal Colony Series I’d begun back in ’93. It might have been the last work in the series if Brett Jones and Sarah Stubbs hadn’t invited me to participate in an exchange project between West Space and another artist run space in Hong Kong, Para/Site, planned for the following year. This second project, Materia Prima, became a pivot point for further expansion, offering a fresh challenge and opportunity to take the ideas underpinning Transcriptions much further into a different kind of dialogue where ‘historic distance’ gives way to direct cross cultural exchange.