ABSTRACT SOUVENIRS
ABSTRACT SOUVENIRS, 2025
SHORT FILM. SHOT IN NTH. AMERICA
5:42 MIN
In my childhood, travel was a way of collecting wonder. On camping trips with my family into the interior of Australia with all that unmistakable iron-rich orange soil, I was drawn to small objects and artefacts that carried a quiet magic.
These were things available to us to buy as travellers through these rural towns and mining communities: a dark iron-ore stone flecked with silver, a metal mineral sample formed of pointed geometric columns, a small wire rock tree with maybe a bit of potch opal, as well as those Indigenous wooden objects with dark burnt lines such as digging sticks, curved bark vessels, or carved animals like wombats and kangaroos.
These objects rarely marked a specific place; instead, for me, they carried the memory of trips in their entirety. I loved them for what they were materially, simple organic objects, transformed into curious and remarkable artefacts containing ideas, representation, and traces of a vibrant culture I was slowly becoming aware of and learning about which connected to my own identity as a white Australian.
As I grew older, I began to see the entanglements behind these objects: the ways they were produced for tourist markets, often disconnected from the artists and communities they represented, created through commerce and extraction. As an artist transforming material myself, these and many entanglements persist. I feel compelled to explore the complex histories carried by the materials I use: the ecological, ethical, and cultural legacies embedded in the land, the clay, glazes, pigments, metals, charcoal, textiles, and digital formats like this video, letting these questions guide my studio investigations.
This collection of video was shot in North America during the second term of the Trump Presidency, a very unsettling time in American history to be an immigrant, a student, and queer person in living in America.