An accumulative event of mineralogical, metaphysical and metallurgical telling, ‘Lost Rocks (2017–21)’ is a unique library of forty three books composed by forty six contemporary artists from around the world. Part artwork, part curatorial platform and part experiment in publishing as art practice. Increments of absence. This life that is all at once. Love. Grief. Relation.
At the conceptual heart of this ambitious project sits a discarded geological specimen display board, found by A Published Event at the Glenorchy Tip shop in the northern suburbs of nipaluna/Hobart, Tasmania. Land of the muwinina people. Forty of its fifty-six rocks were missing (the forty-first came loose in transit three years later). At once, the rock board is both a decomposing geological taxonomy and a proposition for new mineralogical recomposings of body, duration and event.
This library replaces the missing rocks, not with geological specimens, but ‘fictiōnellas’, from the 19th century term ‘fictioneer’. Commonly defined as a ‘writer or inventor of fiction’, the idea is reinvented here through ‘fictiōneering’ – a process of making-with the events of lived experience. A bringing into language the living experience of the event.
Returning to its Latin root of ‘fictiō’, meaning to make-with rather than to make up, this process of fictiōneering, or making-with, is itself a process of ‘speculative eventing’. Through the fictiōnella, A Published Event takes the printed novella back to its roots as a storytelling process based in lived experience. As the recording of news, the recounting of real-life events, it is a process very much activated in the oral tradition. Critically, the fictiōnella is a gesture of experiential and imperceptible telling.
Since 2016, our missing rocks and the artists they each found along the way have expanded and intruded in ways we might never have imagined—were the lure of absence a less familiar, less curious and less open to invention, thing. With each publishing, the library is distributed through live events, site-specific performances, readings, online gatherings, art book fairs, residencies, fieldwork—and most important of all—collaboration. Get in touch.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body; and Arts Tasmania.
Margaret Woodward is an artist, writer and publisher based in lutruwita/ Tasmania. She is co-founder of duo A Published Event (APE), making long-term relational artworks through shared acts of public telling. Exploring chance encounter, constructed situations and the shared authorship of lived experience, In 2019, Margaret was awarded the Ruth Stephan Fellowship at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. Woodward’s publications, ‘Crocoite’ and ‘Fall of the Derwent’ were long-listed as finalists in the 2017 Premier’s Literary Awards, Tasmania, Australia. Woodward has a PhD in Design from Curtin University of Technology.
Justy Phillips is an artist, writer and publisher. She is co-founder of duo A Published Event, making long-term relational artworks through shared acts of public telling. Exploring chance encounter, constructed situations and the shared authorship of lived experience, Phillips works with artists and writers, materials and ideas, writing, prose, book-works and performance. In 2019, Justy was awarded the Ruth Stephan Fellowship at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. She has a PhD from RMIT University, Melbourne.
Jane Rendell (BSc, DipArch, MSc, PhD) is Professor of Critical Spatial Practice at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, where she co-initiated the MA Situated Practice and supervises MA and PhD projects. Jane has introduced concepts of ‘critical spatial practice’ and ‘site-writing’ through her authored books: The Architecture of Psychoanalysis (2017), Silver (2016), Site-Writing (2010), Art and Architecture (2006), and The Pursuit of Pleasure (2002).
Sarah Jones explores text as the medium through which critical theory performs as the material of practice. She is currently examining the ways in which publishing as artistic practice can be redefined as process-based, through experimental writing practices as they emerge at the juncture of philosophy, art and writing. Sarah holds a PhD from the University of New South Wales and a Masters of Fine Art from the Dutch Art Institute.
Ross Gibson is an artist, writer and Centenary Professor in Creative & Cultural Research at the University of Canberra. Recent works include the books 26 Views of the Starburst World (UWAP) and Stone Grown Cold (Cordite Books) and the co-production of the ABC Radio National Feature ‘Energy Grids’. Outside academia he was inaugural Creative Director at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (1998 – 2002) and a Senior Consultant Producer for the establishment of the Museum of Sydney (1993–96).
Ben Walter is a Tasmanian author of lyrical fiction, poetry and experimental nature writing whose work has appeared in Lithub, Meanjin, The Best Australian Science Writing, Guardian Australia, The Saturday Paper and a wide range of other periodicals. He has been shortlisted four times in the Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prizes, and his debut collection of short stories, “What Fear Was”, is forthcoming in 2021 from Puncher and Wattmann. He is the fiction editor at Island.
Ally Bisshop is an artist, writer and researcher, dividing her time between Berlin and Sydney. Her research and process-driven practice combines sculpture, sound, text, film, dialogue and image. Her work is an exploration of materiality as movement: experimenting with intensive variations in organic, geologic and temporal processes, and testing the porous categories of life/nonlife. Ally holds both a Ph.D. and B.F.A from UNSW Art and Design, Sydney, was a student in Olafur Eliasson’s Institut für Räumexperimente at the UDK Berlin.
Greg Lehman is an Indigenous Visiting Research Fellow at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and has recently completed a PhD at the University of Tasmania’s School of Art on visual representations of Tasmanian Aborigines. Greg is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the Australian National University’s Humanities Research Centre, supporting the development of Encounters exhibition.
James Newitt is an artist who has exhibited his work in exhibitions in museums, galleries and public spaces throughout Australia and Europe. In 2012 he was awarded the prestigious Samstag Scholarship to participate in the Maumaus Independent Study Program in Lisbon where he continues to live and work.
Mary Scott is a visual artist and passionate arts educator and mentor. Her work is cross media and manifests in many contexts and formats. Among her achievements are a Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Contribution to Teaching and Learning, University of Tasmania. Residences include Bath Spa University Research Centre; Project Space, Wimbledon College of Art, and she was Guest Artist, Haystack School of Arts and Crafts, Maine. She lives and works in Hobart, Tasmania.
Therese Keogh is an artist and writer living and working in Narrm/Melbourne, Australia. Her practice operates at intersections between sculpture, geography, and landscape architecture, to produce multilayered projects that explore the socio-political and material conditions of knowledge production. Therese holds an MFA from Sydney College of the Arts, and an MA Geography from Queen Mary University of London. She is currently undertaking a PhD at Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.
Rory Wray-McCann is an underground miner who has lived on the West Coast of Tasmania for nearly three decades, working and helping to raise and fund a family of three. He got out of ‘the black rabbit game’ a while ago and rebadged himself as a surface tip rat with a creative bent. Rory uses the materials of the Tasmanian landscape, mainly rocks and crystals, as his palette, creating large scale geological compositions set in concrete.
Julie Gough is an artist, writer and curator based in Hobart. Her art/research practice often involves uncovering and re-presenting conflicting and subsumed histories, many referring to her family’s experiences as Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Julie holds a PhD from the University of Tasmania and has exhibited widely in Australia since 1994 including: TENSE PAST, solo survey exhibition, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, 2019. Her work is held in most Australian state and national gallery collections.
Tine Melzer works as an artist, author and lecturer. Her work connects the philosophy of language with visual means and literature; her main motif is language. She has studied Fine Arts and Philosophy in Amsterdam and received her PhD from the University of Plymouth after undertaking research on Ludwig Wittgenstein & Gertrude Stein. Today she teaches at HKB Bern University of the Arts. Recently published works include Taxidermy for Language-Animals (Rollo Press, Zürich 2020) and Ludwig & Gertrude (With Egon Stemle, edition taberna kritika, Bern 2021).
Tine Melzer works as an artist, author and lecturer. Her work connects the philosophy of language with visual means and literature; her main motif is language. She has studied Fine Arts and Philosophy in Amsterdam and received her PhD from the University of Plymouth after undertaking research on Ludwig Wittgenstein & Gertrude Stein. Today she teaches at HKB Bern University of the Arts. Recently published works include Taxidermy for Language-Animals (Rollo Press, Zürich 2020) and Ludwig & Gertrude (With Egon Stemle, edition taberna kritika, Bern 2021).
Raymond Arnold is an Australian printmaker whose work reflects the construction of the Tasmania landscape, in particular that of the west coast, his adopted home. Raymond has held more than 50 solo exhibitions and participated in group shows in Australia, Europe and the USA. In 2006, Raymond established Landscape Art Research Queenstown (LARQ) with a dream to develop a wilderness art space as a ‘nest’ for incubation and a supporter of artists’ in residence.
Jerry de Gryse is a landscape architect and co-founder and director of Inspiring Place. Jerry has practice experience that ranges in scale from square metres to thousands of square kilometres and in setting from the city centre to the wilderness. Jerry believes that exceptional public spaces are created where the needs of people for a vibrant setting are integrated with a community’s vision for its place and environmental sustainability principles. Jerry is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects.
Trygve Luktvasslimo is an artist whose work examines seduction, worship and redemption in music and in visual and verbal narratives. Through a diverse practice he locates spiritual projects outside of the religious field, and he looks at how these faith-based concepts influence the construction of characters and stories. He exhibits and performs internationally in galleries, museums, festivals and clubs. Trygve holds an MFA in Visual Art from Malmö Art Academy, Sweden (2006). He is a board member, Arts Council Norway and a public art consultant KORO, Norway Office for public Art.
Lucy Bleach is an artist whose practice focuses on human’s enduring relationships to volatile environments, seeking engagement with communities that authentically experience such relationships, and researchers who monitor the earth’s movement. She works across sculptural objects, architectural forms and geo-acoustics to create artworks where processes, forms and actions are informed by geologic force, and the ensuing instability and transformation. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and undertaken research projects in geologically unstable regions around the world.
Wendy Morrow is a dancer, teacher and collaborator who grew up within a family of dancers, trained at the Australian Ballet School in the early 70s before pursuing a career as a professional dancer in Australia and overseas. She has performed with the Monte Carlo Ballet, The Scottish Ballet, The Sydney Dance Company and Danceworks and as an independent artist she has been at the vanguard of integrating dance with other forms for most of her career. Her work is deeply rooted in the kinaesthetic and the presence of the imaginative body.
Ruth Hadlow has a process-based art practice which includes installation work, writing, performative lectures and artist’s books. Ruth has a PhD from the University of South Australia and works as a freelance educator focused on creative research & process-based contemporary arts practice. She co-runs salon, a platform supporting the development of experimental and intimate new work and ideas, and SalonWriting, which publishes writing by visual artists.
Jo Paterson Kinniburgh is a spatial designer. She is a Wugulora First Nations descendant of the formerly enslaved Karyouacou West African peoples, whose position is that architecture is a device for spatially enacting erasure. Jo is a lecturer in the School of Architecture at UTS; a doctoral candidate in the UTS Centre for the Advancement of Indigenous Knowledges; and a director at Bangawarra, a design partnership with D’harawal Knowledge Keeper Shannon Foster.
Louisa King is an artist. Her practice is one of site responsive landscape experimentation, carried out through installation, drawing and performative writing. Louisa’s practice explores the dialectic potential of landscape architectural practice in accessing the nature/culture collapse. Her interest lies in cartography, ficto-criticism, and temporary event based landscape design and material explorations of the geologic city. Louisa is a lecturer in landscape architecture at University Technology Sydney and PhD candidate at RMIT University, Melbourne.
Shevaun Cooley is a Western Australian poet, essayist, and climber. Her poetry has been published in Cordite, Island, Poetry Wales, Meanjin, Southerly, The Best Australian Poems (2009, 2017), and she has been shortlisted for both the Newcastle Poetry Prize, and the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize. Her debut collection of poems, Homing was released in 2017 by Giramondo Publishing.
Perdita Phillips is an Australian artist/researcher primarily interested in the environment and the relationships between humans and nonhuman others (rocks, plants, animals, ecosystem processes). She has published Invisible Monsters (2018), A simple rain (Vivienne Glance and Perdita Phillips 2012) and birdlife (2011) with Lethologica Press. Recent exhibitions include Listening in the Anthropocene (2020 Charles Sturt University) Make Known: The Exquisite Order of Infinite Variation (2018 UNSW Galleries) and Incinerator Art Award (2017 Incinerator Gallery).
Tricky Walsh works both collaboratively and in a solo capacity. Their projects focus on both spatial and communication concerns and while they use a diversity of media (architecture, painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, sound, film, comics, radio) it is foremost the concept at hand that determines which form of material experimentation occurs within these broader themes. They have exhibited extensively throughout Tasmania, Australia and Internationally.
Lyndal Jones is a Melbourne-based visual artist who employs performance, dance and video installation. Jones’ work focuses on the politics of context, place and gender through very long-term projects, including The Avoca Project (2005-19) with Watford House. She has exhibited extensively in both solo and group shows in Australia and overseas. (In 2001, Jones represented Australia at the Venice Biennale). She holds a PhD from RMIT University where she was Professor of Contemporary Art (2010-16).
Bianca Hester is an artist and writer who currently lives in Wollongong, on unceded Dharawal land. Her research engages with the fabric of urban space, where place is approached as a complex constellation of human timescales, nonhuman durations, atmospheric forces, objects, histories and geologic materialities. Bianca completed PhD at RMIT (Melbourne, 2007) and is a continuing member of the Open Spatial Workshop (with Terri Bird and Scott Mitchell). She is currently co-director of Research and Enterprise in the school of Art and Design at UNSW Sydney.
Catherine Evans is a Berlin-based Australian artist who works across photography, sculpture and installation. Her work focuses on geologic time and where this intersects with our own human timescales: as found in our bodies, their materiality and our lived-histories through colonialism and archaeology. She was recipient of a VCA Graduate Mentorship (2013) and Georges Mora Fellowship (2017). She has exhibited widely, most recently her work “Standing Stone” won first prize in the 2020 Neuköllner Kunstpreis, Berlin.
Caroline Loewen is curator at the Lougheed House, a historic house museum in Calgary, Canada. She holds a Master’s degree in Art History from the University of St. Andrews, as well as a BA in Archaeology and a BA in Art History from the University of Calgary. Her degrees in both Art History and Archaeology support her interests in art, history, and land; her curatorial practice focuses on exploring ideas around cultural geography, place-making, memory, and cultural/natural landscapes.
Helena Demczuk is a painter based in Queenstown on the west coast of Tasmania. The daughter of Ukrainian migrants, Helena lived in Papua and New Guinea before enrolling at QIT, Brisbane and Monash University, Melbourne to study Ukrainian language and literature. In 2005 Helena completed a BFA at the University of Tasmania, School of Art which included a semester at the Glasgow School of Art. Her artwork focuses on people, landscapes and the colour that unites them.
Nancy Kuhl is a poet and Curator of Poetry for the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. She is author of full-length poetry collections including Suspend (2010) and Pine to Sound (2015), as well as the chapbooks In the Arbor (1997), winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize, Little Winter Theater (2011), and The Birds of the Year (2016). Kuhl is co-editor, with Richard Deming, of Phylum Press, publisher of poetry pamphlets and chapbooks.
Robin Banks has a passion for geology and the printed page. In her professional career, Robin has been involved in a broad range of human rights advocacy activities and has a strong background in disability rights in particular. In 2000 she was admitted to practice as a Barrister and Solicitor in the Supreme Court of NSW and the High Court of Australia. And in 2010 was appointed Tasmania’s Anti-Discrimination Commissioner. Robin is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Tasmania.
Erica Van Horn is an American artist and writer. An early solo exhibition I’ve Been Making Books Since the Day President Kennedy Was Shot (1986) at Franklin Furnace, NYC, gathered together a selection of her Artist Books. Her work has increasingly evolved to a primary form of narrative writing. Recent publications include Living Locally (2014), Em & Me (2018), Too Raucous For A Chorus (2018), Nous avons assez de pluie eu (2020) and By Bus (2021). Based in rural Ireland, she works together with Simon Cutts on the publications and projects of Coracle.
Ilana Halperin, born in New York, is an artist based between Glasgow and the Isle of Bute. Her work explores the relationship between geology and daily life. She combines fieldwork in diverse locations – on volcanoes in Hawaii, caves in France, geothermal springs in Japan with an active studio-based practice. Her work has featured in solo exhibitions worldwide including Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité and Artists Space, New York. She was the Inaugural Artist Fellow at National Museums Scotland. Ilana Halperin: Felt Events is forthcoming from Strange Attractor/MIT Press.
Jen Bervin is a poet and visual artist. Her multidisciplinary, research-driven practice activates the intersections of text and textiles, art, poetry, and scholarship, science, technology, and craft, and has been widely recognized, collected, and exhibited internationally. Bervin has received fellowships from Creative Capital, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, MacDowell Colony, Center for Book Arts, and Camargo Foundation in France.
Loren Kronemyer is an artist living and working in remote lutruwita (Tasmania), Australia. Her works span interactive and live performance, experimental media art, and large-scale worldbuilding projects aimed at exploring ecological futures and survival skills. As part of duo Pony Express, she collaborates frequently with laboratories, including most recently as the first resident at the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Tasmania.
Chris Henschke is an artist who works across analogue and digital media and experimental physics and chemistry. He has exhibited internationally, including the National Gallery of Australia, 2004; the Natural History Museum in Vienna, 2016; and Dark Mofo, Hobart, 2019; and has undertaken various residencies including the Australian Synchrotron, 2007 and 2010, and the ANAT Synapse program at the CSIRO, 2018. He has a PhD which included practice at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), Switzerland, 2013-2017.
Sofie Burgoyne is an artist currently working between Australia, Portugal and the UK. Making and performing artistic work related to the body, in a range of different contexts, her artistic practice is interested in alternative ways of relating mind to body, reality to the imagined and self to other. Inherent in her outlook of making is reflection and critique of the place of performance in theatres and consideration of the relevance and social function of art itself. As a maker and performer Sofie works across independent and company environments, collaborating with theatre makers, sound producers, visual artists, dancers and choreographers. Recently Sofie has collaborated with Miguel Pereira (O Rumo Do Fumo, PT), Theo Clinkard (UK) and Frantic Assembly (UK) and her work has been presented by The Place (UK) and Movement Research at Judson Church (US).
Katie Stackhouse is an Australian artist living and working in Naarm/Melbourne. Examining notions of time within landscape, contemporary human interactions with natural environments and emerging experiential technologies, her sculptural, spatial and performance-based practice is informed by scientific and philosophical views of ecology. After completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Stackhouse studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Art Academy in the Netherlands. Stackhouse is currently completing a Master of Contemporary Art at the Victorian College of the Arts and has been a resident at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in the USA, the Amsterdams Grafisch Atelier in the Netherlands and Durrmu Arts Centre in Peppimenarti, Australia. Her work is included in private collections throughout Australia, Europe, Japan and the USA.
Polly Stanton is an artist and filmmaker who currently lives and works
in Narrm/Melbourne, Australia. Her work primarily investigates the relationships between environment, human actions and land use. Her films and installations focus on contested sites and extractive zones, presenting landscape as a politically charged field of negotiation, entangled with history, technology and capital. Recent exhibitions include; Indefinite Terrains. Metro Arts, Brisbane, Australia (solo) and Shelter in Place. Town Hall Gallery, Melbourne, Australia; Notions of Care. Bus Projects, Melbourne, Australia; and Her Beauty and Her Terror. Caboolture Regional Art Gallery, QLD, Australia. Stanton was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy (Fine Art), RMIT University in 2018.
Siddharth Pandey is a Research Fellow in Global History at the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich, Germany. Pandey’s research straddles English literature, cultural studies, global history, heritage conservation, visual arts, materiality studies and geohumanities. Hailing from the Himalayas of Shimla in North India, he completed his Bachelors (H), Masters (MA) and MPhil in English Literature from the University of Delhi (India), after which he joined the University of Cambridge for a second MPhil in Children’s Literature from 2012-13. He recently completed his PhD (2019) at Cambridge, that studied the ways in which ‘making’ in its myriad forms (like human craftsmanship and non-human growth) impacts the genesis of ‘wonder’ in secondary worlds of fantasy literature. In 2019 Pandey was a Visiting Scholar at Yale University’s Centre for British Art.
Dominique Chen lives and works in South East Queensland, Australia. She is a proud biridja gamilaroi woman and is passionate about communicating ideas of culture, place and environment through her work. She currently lectures at Griffith University (Queensland College of Art) in the areas of Aboriginal art, culture and socio-political histories. Dominique is also part of momo doto, an ongoing collaboration with Sydney-based artist Tom Blake. She is currently undertaking doctoral study at the University of Technology Sydney, exploring the intersections between relational art, actvism and urban Aboriginal agriculture.
Tom Blake is an artist whose solo and collaborative practice draws on fragmented moments, looped imagery and recurring motifs as potential sites for contemplating the psychological, architectural and technological frameworks that surround us. Tom has exhibited in Australia, Japan and Italy and has been a finalist in Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award, The Blake Prize, the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award, the CLIP Award and has previously been awarded a Clitheroe Foundation Mentorship. Tom is also part of momo doto, an ongoing collaboration with Brisbane-based artist Dominique Chen.
A Published Event (collaborative duo, Justy Phillips and Margaret Woodward) make long-term relational artworks through shared acts of public telling. Exploring chance encounter, constructed situations and the shared authorship of lived experience, they work with materials and ideas, language, installation and performance. A.P.E’s hybrid works explore the metaphysical language and speculative publishing of lived experience. Together we co-compose complex fields of social, cultural and political relations.