​My grandma showed me how to make my first pom pom. We cut two doughnut-shaped templates out of cardboard and spent hours carefully threading the wool through the hole. Cutting the pom pom open revealed our time together, in soft coloured layers. 
  
Pom poms are made with our hands. This gentle winding of materials can slow down time; place you in the room with those you love. Your body learns the movements, and the repetition reminds you that you are here, in this moment. 

I started making pom poms again when my partner first got sick. I wasn’t prepared for the medical world with its sharp, intrusive edges. This childhood craft became our soft armour. After Steve died, time changed. Days felt endless but were gone in moments. Making pom poms became a way of tracking time. 

Grief taught me that my body is mostly liquid. Sadness leaves in waves. Tears. During the early days, a package arrived from my four-year-old niece. It was a single tissue. She had sat quietly at her family’s kitchen table, carefully picking out the embossed pattern with a pink texta. Soft Symmetry takes this now visible profile and renders it in pom poms. A large-scale tracing of love and loss.  

​My Nan cut stuff out of the newspaper. She clipped out things that caught her fancy using a pair of gold-handled scissors shaped like a bird, a Kiwi I think. Nan mostly cut out the whole article, although sometimes she just cut out the image. Nan rarely just cut out the words. I never asked Nan about these clippings. Precise newspaper cutting was just something Nan did. In the last decade of her life Nan cut the paper up in rhythm to the alzheimers that slowly changed her brain. Snip. Cut. Remember. Forget. The clippings from this time present a strange and intimate record of her daily life. After Nan died no one knew what to do with the set of chocolate boxes she had methodically refilled with print. I stepped in when I feared they were to be recycled. The clippings moved with me from house to house. I read them. I packed them back up. I reread them. I packed them back up. I photographed them. I counted them. I ordered them. I mixed them up. I tried to make sense of them. I failed. I lost Nan’s plot.
 
A small set of Nan’s clippings feature in my upcoming solo exhibition Spells for Lost Things. The exhibition draws on three collections of objects that passed through the hands of three different women, before finding their way to me.
 
The exhibition opens at Western Plains Cultural Centre on Saturday 21 April 2018 at 2pm. Find further details here - https://www.facebook.com/events/363396024144379/

​Softly Wired is a series of new works by Bathurst artist Karen Golland. The work features four pastel handkerchiefs threaded with wire using rows of running stitches that give the old cotton fabric new form. Dash. Space. Dash. The hankies now appear frozen in time. Each sits on its own circular mirror on the floor, making it seem larger than life.
 
These handkerchiefs have escaped from a much larger collection passed down through Karen’s family for generations, gathering carefully ironed contributions as it went.  The collected outgrew one chocolate box only to fill another and another. By the time Karen inherited the collection there were two hundred and twenty handkerchiefs.
 
Handkerchiefs have a past. They might have been used for waving, remembering, signalling, gifting, sneezing, protecting, mending, embellishing, nursing, messaging, crying, dabbing, collecting. When they were dropped in childhood games you had to run as fast as you could or you’d lose your place. Sometimes they were the secret language of lovers.
 
Softly Wired forms part of larger body of work that uses inherited collections to explore the role objects play in conjuring personal narratives and histories.  The works draw on the intimate pleasure found in collecting precious and mundane things and details how the meaning of these collections slips and changes when we die. These works deliberately embellish the past, reflecting the complexities inherent in remembering those who have died.

One Single Wish follows on from my recent work on death and grieving. It’s a site-specific installation composed of hundreds of handcrafted pom poms. These pom poms were crafted in response to my partner’s illness and death. The bright colours and silliness of these quickly wound creations stood in stark contrast to the measured clinical world that surrounded us. After my partner died, communal crafting became a way for me to connect with other people’s experience of grief. I became interested in the ways loss can be externalised and how this act can be used to disrupt the silence that shrouds taboo topics like death and dying. At the centre of my art practice is an intense curiosity in how making can be used to process traumatic events, particularly in those instances when we don’t have the words to wrap around the experience.

Each pom pom for this work is made out of nylon knitting ribbon and attached to a thin bamboo skewer. The skewers are of differing lengths with the tallest standing at 50cms, and the shortest hovering just 5cms off the ground. When viewed individually each stem echoes a dandelion seed head; a plant steeped in Australian folklore and said to grant wishes. The idea behind One Single Wish can be traced to my own personal experience with the absurd and fickle nature of wishing. In the midst of Steve’s first round of treatment I wished out loud that there would be a parking spot right out the front of the radiologists. There was. The granting of this banal wish became a source of dark amusement for us as we balanced treatment with palliative care, whilst also navigating the complexities of living together. The work asks, what if we all had One Single Wish but never knew when it would be granted, so it was likely to wished away on a thing that didn’t matter.
​
The pom poms for One Single Wish are installed on and around a single bed frame. The bed is a powerful symbol, linked with private spaces, bodies and dreaming. One Single Wish draws on this history, and also references the bed as the place of birth and death. It touches on how and where we die, and the ways death and dying have been institutionalized in contemporary Australian society. From this perspective, One Single Wish brings the taboo topic of death and dying into a very public space. It also touches on the discrepancy between how many people want to die at home (70%), and how many people do (14%). The work is deeply personal and draws on my own experience of caring for someone who is dying, and the challenges of caring for them in the home. One Single Wish is presented in shades of pink and purple, and has a glowing aura of prettiness about it. This work resists the idea of illness and death as a battleground cloaked in darkness and playfully suggests that death can be talked about in many different ways. ​​

Future/Public is an exhibition of propositional public artworks in parklands central to the various venues for in the ARTLANDS precinct.  Instead of producing finished and lasting artworks for public spaces, Future/Public will use public space as a platform for questioning the role of art in public.  The exhibition will consist of 10 installations that ‘propose’ potentials for artworks that stands outside of our received expectation and understanding of public art.  In this way, it will challenge the genre’s traditional and suggest new roles, ideas, and modes for art that inhabits the shared space of the public sphere.

Artists: Mark Booth (Hill End), Sarah McEwan (Birrego), Julie Montgarrett (Wagga), April Phillips (Coffs Harbour), Amelia Reid (Murwillumbah) Genevieve Carroll (Hill End), Karen Golland (Bathurst), Dani Marti (Cessnock) Christine McMillan (Kandos) and Rochelle Summerfield (Grafton).

Artists and art lovers came from across the state to take part in the four-day event, with a steady stream of people making their way from work to work on Kandos' main streets. 

Cementa 2015 kicked off on Thursday night with a parade of work by students from Glen Alice Public School and finished on Sunday with a film night at the Down the Track Cafe. 

Several of the works were exhibited in shop windows, at local landmarks, or in disused buildings. 

One work, Kurt Sorensen's I Break Horses, was shown in an old barn that provided the perfect background for photographs inspired by bushranger Jessie Hickman. 

Patrons were able to take one of three tours with one of the festival's artists as their tour guide, visiting some of the exhibits, hearing from some of the artists about the inspiration for the pieces and their usual art practices, and listening to the tour guides offer insights about the other works. 

'ALTHOUGH I'M SURE THERE ARE A FEW LOCALS WHO HAVE THEIR LIP CURLED UP BECAUSE OF THE NUMBER OF PEOPLE IN 'THEIR TOWN’.'

“I think everyone's an artist. We're all very visual so you can find art in everything,” Cementa visitor Melissa Murray said. 

Dubbo artist Kim Goldsmith exhibited her work, Indicatus, in the chapel of the old Spanish convent.

“I had to put a rug down to dampen the sound part of my work but it's become a bit of a highlight and almost part of the installation,” she said. 

“It's great to watch, because the kids and dogs walk all over it, but most of the adults walk around the outside like they're not sure if they should touch it or not,” she said. 

Djon Mundine's mural of Jimmy and Peggy Lambert, was almost complete by Saturday afternoon with the help of descendants of the Lamberts and local Aboriginal people.

“We had quite a few people help on Saturday morning,” Mr Mundine said. 

“It's been great to watch because non-Aboriginal people have been coming along to help and sharing stories of their families and how they knew or knew of the Lamberts.”

Kandos local Gay Ryan said she hadn't heard anyone coming to look at the works on display at the CWA Hall say anything bad about the festival and its exhibits. 

“Everyone has been really excited about it really,” she said. 

“Although I'm sure there are a few locals who have their lip curled up because of the number of people in 'their town’.” 

Visitors were also invited to join in workshops focussing on recycling discarded and everyday items into works of art, ranging from new ways to use electronics, to creating home made synthetizers from garden lights and the fine art of flag making.

Cementa is a biennial festival and will return to the region in 2017.

Beta Geyer & James Culkin's piece Geometries: Kandos is a site-responsive installation at the former convent, the light catching the material and the modular forms in stunning contrast to the architecture. It was the only large modernist sculpture across the festival, this year with a little more video work than its inaugural event. 

Mark Booth used a former industrial "crusher" that was used at the Kandos cement works, neatly packing his grey, or cement coloured, sculpture 22.300-90inside. Booth played with scale and association in a delightful and erudite way in this piece and, like so many works at Cementa15, was a subtle discovery to stumble upon.

Juilee Pryor with her installation A Meditation on the Redundancy of Childhood,comprised of one hundred ghostly found forms that remind us - like Kandos with its closed cement works - how something so vital can be stripped bare so quickly deemed no longer of value. A simple piece, it struck a chord with both locals and visitors and offered an easy bridge for shared conversations. 

Jumaadi presented a moving "low-tech" shadow puppet play, Little shadow and something to swallow, with a group who travelled down from Queensland for the festival. It told the story of Indonesian political prisoners during the 2nd World War held at Cowra, and has an uncanny resonance with the layered histories of Kandos and its surrounds, while not Indonesian, moved between stories of power, land and culture. 

Tina Havelock Stevens (drums) and Liberty (guitar) took a twilight take on the Australian Open, dueling it out in their performance Racquet Racket Duel Dual. Tina also presented a stunning performance, usurping the Men's Shed with her story of Lady Bushranger, White Drummer Lady Bushranger, in which she channels the punk spirit of Jessie Hickman backdrop to a video and smoke screen. Both were highlights of the festival.  

Dani Marti's video Stitch 'n Bitch was a fabulous insertion at the Kandos Museum, positioned within close proximity to the local lace collection and Nicole Barakat's sewing circle. Marti's video was filmed over two months in Wollombi NSW, the national park that edges onto Kandos. 

Nicole Barakat's performance / installation Meditation (Decolonisation) reached out beautifully to locals, sitting here stitching with and chatting. The piece was two fold - a wealth of doilies collected from Kandos community op shops, which she then took rubbings of and then sewed anew the negative spaces; and secondly a blunt description of the 1824 massacre of the Wiradjuri people that sits deep within the history of this town. 

Loss carries across several of the artworks. Karen Golland's field of pom-poms The Nature of Things, is a response to the grief of her partner dying. Viewed from the road or stumbled across in a paddock, it is indicative of the subtlety and sensitivity of many of the works at Cementa15.

Alan Schacher performed throughout Cementa15, seen wandering the streets with his wheelbarrow and cape of newspapers, or at the Manager's tennis court reciting poetry and finding uncanny ways to entertain himself and others with that newspaper. Kandos was a company town - it is said the letters were the initials of the company founders - many of the houses are made of cement and there are many company homes (of varying grandeur) that define this town. The company closed the works in 2012 and moved out. 

Adam Hill (aka Blak Douglas) scattered several sites along the main street of Kandos with hopscotch - a game that is close to many of our memories. But this game had a little darker for Hill, here honouring the victims of the 1824 massacre and another using Kandos postcode, pulling history into our everyday passage. 

Jason Wing created a phenomenal soundscape in the St Laurence Church Syrinx, which combined native bird calls and human conversation, a piece that starts subtly and builds to a near deafening symphony that becomes a powerful physical experience that penetrates beyond mere listening, what Wing explained as 'exploring the intangible connection many Indigenous Australian feel towards Country'.

Daily in the Kandos Community Centre Hall artists and locals sat down together to discuss The District, a project conceived and coordinated by Karen Therese. Here a local nurse with a young miner who moved to the town for work (the mine now soon to close) chats with a homesteader and a Kandos crafter over "a cuppa". 

Stunning projection Selected Memory by Ken Simpson on the side of St Laurence Church. It was the only projection in this year's festival and its success suggests that there is opportunity for more next time round. The textures of the sandstone building against the landscape worked beautifully, and was a really sensitive way to approach the topic of place. 

Lock On was a powerful performance in the Kandos Scout Hall by the William River Valley Artists' Project (WRVAP), an activist group that shed light on​ environmental issues associated with mining industry and logging. Since the cement works closed many residents of Kandos are employed by the mines.

Karla Dickens also tackled the topic of mining in her installation The Whole Black Hole outside the Kandos Museum, with the closed cement works in the background. Using a poker machine resurrected from Lismore tip, Dickens has reset the jackpot as the indigenous flag, as she said: 'A pimp somewhere has heavy pockets. The Poker Machine will tempot to sing you. One armed bandits promise hard cold cash. Red, Black, Yellow Dollars. Black tears. The scars left behind by the money makers.' It is a very powerful piece about the "pay outs" from miners for indigenous land and the divisions it is causing in community and country. While a different story, it nevertheless has a correlation to Kandos and "catch 22" of employment with industry.

Sean O'Keeffe's work stopped viewers in their tracks, a tardis-like arrival of a telephone booth in the path of the former Kandos rail service - both antiquated services today. The object was partnered with a video Cognitive Dissonance which references the iconic 1980 cult film The Chain Reaction in reference to changing social structure of Kandos. O'Keeffe worked with community groups locally including members of the local dramatic society The Twin Town Players, and was screened with the soundtrack's composer, Boris Hunt (Mad Dog Boy), peforming live for Cementa15's closing film night. 

One of the more powerful works in Cementa15 was Fiona Davies work from her Blood on Silk series. Stacked in your typical tin shed at the Dabee Road Nursery, this installation combined a sound element of an auction of medical supplies - blood and plasma - what Davies said is not dissimilar to an agricultural auction. 

melanei e. khava collaborated with Kandos High School students to make this work, asking them to paint a tile of this place with the only instruction that it was not figurative. She has then reflected those paintings in mirror squares the two hover on glass cylinders. It speaks of public and private spaces, conversations so close held and impressions once removed; of landscape and cycles. It is another great example how the Cementa artists reached out to the community during their residencies to make work that connected, rather than being merely imported. 

Joining the other vehicles angle parked on the main street was this wagon filled with foilage and a sound piece of bird calls. It epitomises the "make do" aspect of much of these works that use what is available in the town, the landscape and what rises from an engagement with this community. 


All photos by Gina Fairley for ArtsHub.

Bathurst artist Karen Golland has been selected to take part in the biennial contemporary art festival Cementa15. The festival will take place in the regional township of Kandos from 9 to 12 April 2015 and will feature work from more than sixty artists.

“I’m thrilled to be part of Cementa15. It’s a wonderful event for regional NSW and with Kandos being so close to Bathurst it’s particularly exciting for our local community,” said artist Karen Golland. “Bathurst is home to a great number of people who are interested in contemporary art and think nothing of travelling four or five hours to visit art events or exhibitions. With Kandos being just over an hours drive away people can plan a day trip and bring their families and friends along on a regional art adventure.”

Cementa_15 brings together urban and regional artists for a four-day celebration of contemporary art in Australia.  Taking its regional situation as focus, Cementa_15 celebrates the diversity of voices that can be heard within our contemporary arts communities.  The program will include video, installation, performance, sound, 2d and 3d artworks in venues and locations across the town.

“We showcase contemporary art across the spectrum of practice, from the emerging to the established, from the obscure to the prominent,” said festival curator Alex Wisser. “We’ve got strong regional representation in this year’s festival and are excited to have new work by Bathurst artist Karen Golland included in the lineup.”

The Cementa_15 program also includes work by Hill End artists Genevieve Carroll and Bill Mosely, and Molong artist Heidi Lefebvre. Over the four-day festival visitors will have the opportunity to attend public programs including workshops for children, performances and forums. To find out more and view Cementa_15 artist profiles visit www.cementa.com.au

For more information contact Cementa_15’s media contact Sam Paine on 0431 208 646.