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Regeneration  is the result of an opportunity to work both indoors and outdoors at Chewton in the Victorian Goldfields in 2004 and 2005 courtesy of Andrea and Peter Hylands. Over a year of visiting that place I developed ideas as to what form an outdoor art work could take that would not elementally disturb the environment of that area that is distinguishable by eruptions of quartz signalling former alluvial mining activities.

The quartz brought ideas of memorial and memory, like bone it surfaces to reveal what is never totally concealed about the actions of the past.  I eventually placed quartz onsite adjacent to a state forest such a way that the elements would eventually regain their hold on the form created to move and remove it from whatever story I invoked and impressed it into. Quartz is a magical and potent material existing before and outliving human time.  Sensing that this aspect of timelessness was central to my appreciation of the material enabled me to understand into what form to configure the quartz. Nature to nature, place to place, within me I carry some knowledge, some blood, some cultural memory of my ancestors.

One ancestor, Woretermoeteyenner, was a Tasmanian Aboriginal woman who travelled widely during her life, meeting and working with people of many cultures through the first half of the 1800s. Woretermoeteyenner means a eucalypt leaf and I always feel strongly connected to this ancestor in the presence of these majesterial beings. Before moving far north to Townsville I realised that a representation of a Tasmanian eucalypt leaf would be an object, placed, left signalling my visit that I could ably make to leave behind outside as an ephemeral marker in a marked place, from and of that region and yet also from deep within me, my story and past. 

Regeneration  is an activated form of the quartz installation that remains to wear at Chewton. This branch with its leaves seeming to march upwards and out of a space is able to be carried and live indoors or out whilst it traces and takes me and my connections to people and place onwards. The trail of six bronze eucalyptus leaves tracking up a length of  timber provide a different means of  memorial than the more unstructured external quartz leaf that changes with every rain. The golden bronze of each leaf references also the alluvial goldfields of Chewton and the alchemical magic of molten metal. Each cast leaf also traces the generations from Woretermoeteyenner to me, the same leaf, our regeneration.

With sincere thanks to Andrea and Peter Hylands, Koenraad, Jean-Pierre Chabrol, Clive Willman, Urban Art Projects Brisbane and Ray for their ongoing assistance in the creation, exhibition and relocation of this work to Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi.             http://www.andreahylands.com