Archeaological Dig

Works exhibited at the Goulburn Regional Art Gallery 7 August – 12 September 2009.

Multi-panelled works on paper and steel installation – these works are an interpretation of an archaeological dig, at historic Marulan NSW, as artist in residence.

Digging Marulan
by Denis Gojak

Cemex ( formerly Readymix) received approval to open a new quarry south of the present Marulan township, NSW. Construction would affect the site of Old Marulan established in 1835 and on the NSW State Heritage Register.
An archaeological investigation was required before any new construction on the site began. Archaeologist, Denis Gojak, invited Geraldine as artist in residence to investigate the site and processes involved in an archaeological dig and thus encourage a different way of understanding and representing the site. Excavations began late 2007.

Geraldine responded to the physical location and processes involved with collecting and assessing evidence by Archeologists to produce a body of work that addresses both specific and broader issues of the site's environment, its history and the notion that to understand the local is to understand the broad.

Archaeologists have often used artists on digs in much the same way they would use a photographer, to provide factual, minimally interpreted 'snapshots' of the site and evidence as it emerges. Sometimes they are used to develop reconstruction sketches of what was found to bring life to the remains and to combine different threads of evidence. Very rarely are artists recognised by the archaeological profession as having a different perspective on both the process of investigation and the way that a picture of the past emerges from the various lines of evidence. Archaeologists also do not routinely move from the tangible past, revealed by the stones, ceramics and iron of sites and relics, to looking at the less material aspects of the past.

This is probably the first time, certainly in Australia, that an artist has been so closely involved with an archaeological dig with the aim of working towards a primarily artistic goal rather than being one of the documentation tools of the dig. There are several artists internationally who use the 'performance' aspect of archaeology – primarily the process of systematic recovery, precious treatment of artefacts and an infatuation with systematics and cataloguing – as the springboard for their own art. This includes most notably Mark Dion who has staged large scale performance pieces involving 'archaeological digs' on the banks of the Thames and other places.