Was by the Northern Coast, a collaboration between artists Courtney Pedersen and Charles Robb, brings together their respective practice areas of social history, material culture, identity and installation. This collaborative project offers unexpected outcomes from the merging of their two distinct approaches into a single sculptural installation. Inspired by the mass migration of more than 10,000 Scandinavians to Australia in the nineteenth century as a consequence of the Queensland Assisted Migration program, Was by the Northern Coast evokes the imaginative landscape of a Northern European aesthetic displaced by distance and time. The artists view the work as not only testing the patterns of their own processes, but also questioning perceptions of Queensland being less multicultural and less dynamic than our southern counterparts. The material-based exhibition, particularly through its use of timber, further speaks of Brisbane’s everchanging landscape, which is in a seemingly perpetual state of dismantling and reconstruction.
ARTIST TALK Wednesday 10 August, 6pm
EXHIBITION 3 – 20 August 2011
