Tracing Threads, Nuuk, Kalaallit Nunaat
Islands Dynamics Conference - Darkness II, January 2025
Collaborating Artists: Tania Blackwell with Dr Jane Bartier
Deep within the Arctic tundra, the ice serves as an archival medium, a keeper of memory. Beneath this frozen surface, stirs cataclysmic carbon and the prospects of a forever blackness. The thawing yedoma is the compost heap of deep time. As the ice melts, the whiteness blackens, and the hidden matter and memory become visible.
Through the methodology of situated practice, our research involved arriving in Nuuk, Greenland, before the conference, to immerse ourselves and document the landscape. Site recordings were accomplished through walking, sound, and visual recordings. The creative outputs from this place-based research included content brought with us from the subterranean artesian waterways from Australia and other colonised landscapes, which both loop and contrast the interconnected threads of place and their disturbances across geographical spheres.
Our collaborative work has been captured through interdisciplinary creative explorations, site installations, and assemblages. The edges, thresholds, and tension between these complex narratives were tested, eroded, and then reconstructed, and shared at the conference.
Tania Blackwell - She/Her is an artist, and creative producer and is currently a PhD Candidate at Deakin University, Melbourne. Darkness, memory, and haunting in landscapes are recurring themes throughout her current research and creative practice. Tania holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours, from RMIT University and a Master of Landscape Architecture, from Melbourne University.
www.taniablackwell.com
Dr Jane Bartier - She / Her is an artist working in site-specific practices of walking, looming, and writing. These are embodied to query, unravel, and reveal understandings of her surroundings. Jane's work is temporal, site-specific, and generated within conversations. Jane completed her PhD at Deakin University, Melbourne in 2021. Jane was a participant in the Deakin University-led Venetian Blind program at Palazzo Bembo, in conjunction with the 2019 Venice Biennale.
www.janebartier.com
Durational Environmental Recordings - magnifying plastic, food waste, snow, food colouring.
Durational Environmental Recordings — Watercolour and paper booklets Tania Blackwell 2025