Artists-in-residence Samuel Beilby, Meet Me In The Garden (Claire Billie Bushby, W. Sze Tsang and Mark Wahlsten), and regional artist-in-residence Marcia Leonard joined artist and researcher Dr Perdita Phillips for a reflective conversation on their time at PICA. Together, they trace the quiet intersections of art, science and nature from the tensions of extractive industry in regional WA to the subtle entanglements of human and non-human life. This discussion offers a window into the artists’ evolving practices, shaped by place, community and the urgent ecologies we find ourselves within.
[Miranda Johnson] My name is Miranda and I work as the Public Programs and Studio Manager at PICA. I’d like to acknowledge that we are meeting on Whadjuk Noongar Boodja and pay my respects to elders past and present. Tonight we have a very special version of Open Studios with Meet Me in the Garden, Samuel Beilby and Marcia Leonard, with the conversation facilitated by Dr Perdita Phillips. Dr Perdita Phillips explores places and ecologies through walking, listening and responding, utilising a range of visual media to create art prompted by issues such as more-than-human worlds, extractivism and polycrisis, and the un-forgetting of Australian settler colonial landscapes.
[Dr Perdita Phillips] Thank you for having me. I’d like to acknowledge that is Reconciliation Week and that we have much more to do than just acknowledge this. I’d like to thank the five artists here tonight that are opening up their studios for us. I’ll be asking each person to speak a little bit about their projects and then we will draw some themes and connections between all three residences. Each residency uses different processes, media and approaches and is at a different stage of development. Samuel Beilby is an artist based in Boorloo who is interested in processes of extraction, noise, materialism and labour within industrial and social systems. His practice often combines historical period research, with new media tools and amplification to produce effective outcomes that explore online turbulence and paranoia. He is also a PhD candidate at UWA School of Design, developing an analytical framework for post COVID noise art and a member of the Boorloo-based art collective mg. Samuel, could you briefly describe your residency and central project, where it is and how it combines archival images and the arranging of objects?
[Samuel Beilby] I’m developing a body of work that stems from the current sociopolitical and cultural circumstances in a coal mining town where my family is from – Collie in the Southwest of WA. I’m considering history of coal mining that my family’s been involved with since they immigrated here from Italy in the 1950s. I am working from film material, which is different from digital and means lighthouse scanning and archival resources and things from the Coalfields museum. This draws an analogy between extraction, not only as an industrial procedure but as cultural ideology. The way I am exploring that is by looking at the current situation in Collie, which is four years out from the state closing all the coal mining. I am looking at the way extraction is perceived through the town, through the incoming Collie battery field that is beginning this year. I am also examining extraction with a cultural lens, through the analogy of olive oil pomace, another thing that is central to my family and defines them, as my family is a bunch of coal miners. Pomace is a term to describe the gritty fleshy remains of an olive that is left from being used of its resources.
[PP] Your work also explores technical processes that might be unfamiliar, what role does the extraction of archival work and material play in the sense of pulling out from them?
[SB] I think extraction is present across a lot of the work that I have done, but particularly in this project. In my studio, there’s a lot of abstract imagery, cartographic maps taken from their original home and ripped up. I spent some time in open pit coal mine in Collie, and I used a lighthouse scanning app on my phone to create a 3D image of coal. When you take this documentation of 3D mesh, produce a JPEG file and blow it up to a big scale, it produces this abstract image, which works as a way of doubling or being a counterpart to extraction (in an artistic practice). It warps a resource from its original context in a way that produces a type of feeling.
[PP] We talked the other day about your interest in compression, both in the reality and the metaphor of what you’re doing, can you talk a little bit about this?
[SB] Compression and concertation are what first led me to start thinking about this project a couple of years ago. Olive oil production (what my family does) is a tradition I do with my Nonno. It’s a laborious process that requires a lot of olives to create a little bit of olive oil. In a similar way, I was interested in this narrative about coal and how it is condensed dead animal bones and matter baked over million of years to create this fossil called coal. I was interested in drawing a connection and analogy of compression.
[PP] Thank you, Samuel. Moving on now to Marcia Leonard’s artistic practice, which is really a connection between people and the natural world, emphasising place, memory and the personal experience. She uses a range of materials and techniques, including lumen photography, drawing, print making and textiles to create multi-disciplinary installations that evoke a sense of belonging and identity in natural spaces. You have come up from Esperance for a shorter residency, it was interesting to hear last week about olive groves in your practice as well. Could you talk a bit about this idea of cultivating landscape and this idea of perivóli?
[Marcia Leonard] Yes thank you, perivóli is a Greek word, my background is Greek. My family would often talk about their olive groves, different to the landscape I grew up in, a country town in northern NSW. It was a mining and farming town in a rural community. My family would describe the gardens in Greece, which I would compare to my experience of bushland, and think well my concept of beauty is different to theirs. Theirs had been contained and safe, which was very different to how I felt in the bush, and it interested me how we become our environment and the process that gets us there. Also psychological responses to a place or an environment, so the idea of beauty and danger sort of prompted me as well.
[PP] When you got the opportunity to come and work on a project here that has come from that long term interest, what were the things that you really focused on?
[ML] I wanted to work with the plants in and around Perth, in Kings Park and in the native national parks and wild spaces. It was good to be here so I could visit and look at the library of plants, to go to Kings Park and see how they are cultivated and arranged and then to try and integrate that in my practice and create work that reflects the space, but also my interaction with the space.
[PP] Did you find it easy? You have a different dialogue with both the medium and the place being new to you, were there problems or did you enjoy it all?
[ML] I enjoy working with different media because it helps me focus, it helps me create and distil essence. I try to simplify what I’m seeing and so the process has helped me to slow down. It was really good to be somewhere new because sometimes when we’re in a space that we’re familiar with, we forget to notice the space. We sort of imagine what the space looks like without thinking about it.
[PP] You also have photos in your studio of this tree that lets you know you’re on Tjaltjraak country, it’s this eucalyptus that’s low-lying with silvery, very sculptural stems.
[ML] Yes, it’s important for me to know the plants that I am working with, not in a scientific way, but it’s important to understand the stories that are associated with those plants, so that I am honouring those stories as well as creating my own. I try to create my own space in this country which I think is something that, if you’ve come from somewhere else, you often wonder: ‘what is home?’ How can I connect to this land, how is my connecting to this land changing or altering this land, and is that a good thing?’
[PP] Did you find it easy? You have a different dialogue with both the medium and the place being new to you, were there problems or did you enjoy it all?
[ML] I enjoy working with different media because it helps me focus, it helps me create and distil essence. I try to simplify what I’m seeing and so the process has helped me to slow down. It was really good to be somewhere new because sometimes when we’re in a space that we’re familiar with, we forget to notice the space. We sort of imagine what the space looks like without thinking about it.
[PP] You also have photos in your studio of this tree that lets you know you’re on Tjaltjraak country, it’s this eucalyptus that’s low-lying with silvery, very sculptural stems.
[ML] Yes, it’s important for me to know the plants that I am working with, not in a scientific way, but it’s important to understand the stories that are associated with those plants, so that I am honouring those stories as well as creating my own. I try to create my own space in this country which I think is something that, if you’ve come from somewhere else, you often wonder: ‘what is home?’ How can I connect to this land, how is my connecting to this land changing or altering this land, and is that a good thing?’
[PP] Thank you very much. Meet Me in the Garden is a collaborative exploration of suburban backyards, how we engage with our gardens and the entangled relation between humans, pets, wildlife and plants. Its members, Claire Billie Bushby, W. Sze Tsang and Mark Wahlsten have a rich background in social practice, sound, music, visual and graphic arts and it was really hard to summarise all of them together. They have only just started, but they have worked together before. With the three of you coalescing in recent projects to produce a common body of work between the three of you, can you speak about what you’re intending to do with this residency and how it relates to your previous work?
[Claire Billie Bushby] We’ve just started this residency, so it’s very early in this project, but on a bigger scale it has actually been going on for a couple of years. I was working on a different project and as a part of that I did a call out to gardeners to let me come have a garden tour and interview them about how the garden connects them to the wider ecology in their suburbs. Then I invited Sze on board to produce the interviews that I did, which is the biggest part of this project and they are all available online. Then Mark came on board with one of the gardeners that we were interviewing and so we all naturally formed and came together.
[PP] Would you like to say something about the self, nature and community nurture? Because that seems to be quite essential to what you’re doing.
[CB] One of the things that I am interested in generally in my practice is looking at these areas where we can connect to nature and the more than human world. That involves an interdependent relationship where we’re taking care of our gardens and the gardens are taking care of us. For example, when I was interviewing Mark and his mum, we didn’t just stay within the fence wall, we went out and we looked at plants in other people’s gardens and the local bush reserve. What I really enjoy is not necessarily bringing people who would think to work in this way, but like going out to community, getting them involved and seeing the way that they might be already doing something and how it fits within an arts practice.
[W. Sze Tsang] When I was editing the sounds, I was thinking about how the garden isn’t just a garden. One person was speaking about memories and how it brought up different memories for them being in their garden. One was two friends getting engaged in her garden, and how that was very special. It was also interesting to see how people were using gardens as sources of self-care, such as noticing birds in your garden or various native plants attracting bees and it plays into my own practice of site-specific work, where I consider how to integrate place into my art.
[Mark Wahlsten] The way that this project has evolved and helped me to make art again, when it feels like everything must have a point, so this gave us something to focus on that does that.
[CB] A garden is anti-extractive in a way that it gives back to you, there’s an exchange. It’s also our little way of responding to climate change and the climate crisis. I never want to grow grass, I want to grow natives to match the ecology of where we live. A garden is our response to a very macro problem.
[PP] Thank you. At this point I’d like to summarise and then open to questions from the audience. Some of the things that keep recurring is an exchange of conversation, but also exchange within the invisible, such as Samuel’s work and the use of copper and the hidden energy of things. In all of these practices, there are sites of things happening, for better or worse, and everybody here has that possibility around science and an intersection of care, gardens and interactions of the plant worlds. Questioning nature and culture, all of them approach the non-human world within human worlds, putting different conceptions of the boundaries between humans and more-than-humans. I think that’s an interesting and very current point. There are different approaches to the same question – current questions around abstracting and extracting culture in Perth and our response to that. I’d like at this point to ask if there any questions in the audience.
[Guest Question] I have a question for Meet Me in the Garden. I noticed that you started your work a couple of years ago and it’s quite a large project and it’s already grown – do you have an intention to contain that growth or are you letting it organically grow?
[CB] In regards to the way that is has grown organically, there’s been moments where I think it’s going to end, and then it continues. One of the unexpected things is that we were we were planning to do this residency before the exhibition in Rockingham. But now it’s happened on the other side.
[WST] Now we are growing it in another way, and we started to think about community gardens and how that fits into this whole story. I’m also interested in how we can make it interactive as well, where your actions can influence the growth of a tree, playing on that idea on what impact we have in the world and the way that we move.
[Audience Question] Thinking about Collie, coal mining and time, I was wondering if you could each talk about the measure of time in your practices?
[SB] That’s a good question. The current situation and legacy in Collie and also other regional mining towns, that employ Australians, there is almost like a second life that’s at the end of their industrial epochs. What’s happening with Collie, is there’s this push to sort of preserve this memory of the place. I took a trip with some of my friends there and trust me, this preservation of a cultural legacy and labour identity holds up.
[ML] Within my work I do lumen prints which uses photographic paper exposed to the sunlight and it’s black and white photographic paper, but the process of time changes the colour of the paper. When you fix the paper, to fix the image, the colours can shift or they can stay the same. It depends on if I’ve left it for a day or sometimes I leave it for two days, sometimes I leave it for a few hours, so time changes the work. Even though that sounds quite simple, it’s also about the imprint that’s left and how the colours change from the plans in print. It might be the light going through one of the images, the brickwork where I had placed the paper coming through, or the heat and the light affecting it.
[CB] I think that when working with gardens, time is right there and we’re seeing that unfold. With climate change, we are seeing that time shift and so we see that time doesn’t quite align with what we think should be happening at certain times.
[WST] Yes, you know there’s this chronological order that plants are meant to follow and you can go back to things like the Gilbert White’s journals to work out what plants are in season today.
[CB] I have a chronic illness, so I work within this different time with my body and am noticing how the changes in my body are like seasons. I am not in control of that and similarly to when you’re tending to a garden, the body becomes something that you have to monitor.
[WST] This has been what our project has really been about, since 2022, three years of us trying to get this going. In my practice, when it comes to sound, I think about time and how you can bring different types of sound in. For instance, in our studio there is a field recording and it’s quite interesting to play with bits of time from a place, the same with photography, and consider what it says about that time, that place.
[MW] It got me thinking about and zooming out to think about how things are changing but this sort of trying to find permanence, even within your backyard how much change occurs but how much you try and secure permanence.
[PP] Thank you so much everyone.
Images: Open Studios – Samuel Beilby, Meet Me In The Garden and Marcia Leonard, facilitated by Dr Perdita Phillips, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2025. Photos: Tristan McKenzie
