Robyn Williams from ABC Radio National came to visit and produced a segment for The Science Show.
Listen here (12 mins):
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/scienceshow/city-sea-at-university-of-wollongong/104264672
TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW:
Robyn Williams: And we end our adventures as observers, and note that great artists and writers such as Virginia Woolf took notebooks on walks and made little lists of beguiling objects and sights she later used in novels. Similar observation is typical of Australian writers such as our own Richard Glover, the late genius John Clarke, and now his daughter, Lauren Clark with her Fitzroy Diaries. And now there’s a new exhibition in the large gallery at the University of Wollongong about the city and the sea. I’m with Leah Gibbs and Lucas Ihlein, an artist and a geographer.
Leah, where are we standing? I know it’s an exhibition room, but it looks quite different, it’s got this wonderful space, and you’d imagine the space would be full of objects, but it isn’t. There are paintings along the wall in a strip, and in front of me there is a huge screen showing the sea. How was that taken?
Leah Gibbs: We’re in the University of Wollongong Art Gallery, and we’re looking at an image, as you’ve just said, of the city from the sea. So actually we’re looking at Big Island, which is one of the five islands off the coast of Wollongong or Port Kembla perhaps more accurately. We took this footage from a fishing boat, and we took a three-hours-40-minute-long journey.
Robyn Williams: Did you aim for that length of time precisely?
Leah Gibbs: We didn’t aim for that length of time precisely, but that’s how long the journey took us. We were really interested in shifting our perspective, looking at a place that we think we know really well from a different perspective, and to see what happens when we do that. So we’re very familiar with the places that we live, taken from particular points of view, and we were really interested in what happens when we move, change our perspective and look at something afresh, with fresh eyes, from a different place. So here we’re looking at the landscape from the ocean.
Robyn Williams: And what was it like? Because it looks fairly lumpy, the ocean. Well, the sea. Were you going up and down and getting bit queasy or what?
Leah Gibbs: We weren’t too queasy. But we did start with the sea quite calm. We started at dawn. We left from Wollongong Harbour. We powered north to Bald Head, Stanwell Tops. We turned around, and in the morning the sea is often quite still in comparison to other parts of the day, and we headed south along the coast. As the day went on, the sea got rougher, which is quite common in our bit of the world. By the time we got to the end of the journey, which was the Gravel Loader, Bass Point, the sea was looking pretty rough. Luckily we weren’t too queasy. But it did challenge the kit that we had set up.
Robyn Williams: You’re a geographer. But Lucas, what’s your line?
Lucas Ihlein: I’m an artist. I describe my art practice as a socially engaged art practice. What that means is one of the ingredients for the kind of art that I make is the social relations between people. People in my line of work, we use any materials or mediums that seem appropriate, but the main thing we’re interested in is what can emerge in terms of people’s interactions and relationships.
Robyn Williams: I see, hence the spaciousness of the room. You expect people to come in and talk to each other?
Lucas Ihlein: Yes. So what you see in here is a bunch of beanbags and a big old couch. And we were surprised, it wasn’t until we set this exhibition up that we realised that it’s a bit like slow TV. It goes for three hours and 40 minutes. People plump themselves down on these comfy chairs. They think to themselves, I’ll just sit here for a couple of minutes and see what’s going on, and then an hour and a half later they check their watch and go, ‘Oh, holy shit, I’ve got to get on to my next thing!’ So it does seem to have a kind of magical effect of making people slow down and just be in the place and chat with each other about their relationship with this place where we live.
Robyn Williams: Now, the long strips of fairly similar paintings, they almost look like watercolours, seem to have lines…is it of poetry? Where did those lines come from?
Lucas Ihlein: What you see hanging on the wall is a 26-metre-long watercolour drawing depicting the coastline, the exact same coastline which is in the video. We, four of us, sat on the boat and made this drawing together. And then our art project leader, Dr Kim Williams, directed us in bringing it together so that it seems like a coherent single work. So you can walk along this coastline through the drawings and see little bits of coasts that you’re familiar with.
Then the next layer added to it is we invited Aunty Barbara Nicholson, who’s a Wadi Wadi Elder down here who we work with sometimes, and we just love her. She’s a poet, and she came along and responded to the drawing by writing this poetic text which travels the entire length of the drawing. So there’s an interplay between the visual and the textual.
Robyn Williams: Interesting. Now, I keep wondering where the science is coming in, because Leah, you’re in the geography department, and I remember a story about a tsunami 200,000 years ago, which shaped more or less further south, especially around Jarvis Bay and so on, and I know you don’t do that particular sort of geography or geology yourself, but you’re aware of that story, are you?
Leah Gibbs: I am aware of that story, Robyn, and you’re absolutely right, I’m a social scientist rather than a physical scientist, so the details of the story we would need to defer to our excellent colleague, Dr Sarah Hamylton.
Robyn Williams: Sure, indeed. But, you see, the whole point of the exhibition is how the sea and the coastline shaped us, and the way it’s changed as well.
Leah Gibbs: Yeah, we’re really interested in how the ocean shapes us, and so, as you’ve said, there’s scientific stories of tsunamis that have shaped the coast. Even if we don’t look to those stories, we know that the sea is constantly changing the coastline, just those shorter-term changes of the high tides, changing the way that the beach is shaped and formed, and the influence that that has on our local creeks and so on. So that kind of process is happening all the time at different scales, different spatial and time scales. So we don’t even need to go to the big stories of tsunami to know that the ocean is shaping the landscape.
But what we’re also really interested in, and what I’m interested in as a social scientist and a human geographer, is the way that the sea shapes us as people, how it shapes society, how it shapes our culture, how it shapes the meanings that we instil in these places, how we interact with these places and with each other.
Robyn Williams: Indeed, because as you go further north, let’s say Queensland, the coast is completely different because it’s protected by this gigantic reef. And I remember when there was a tsunami in Sri Lanka, a train was swept away, and the only point which was not harmed was where the reef had been preserved and the wave couldn’t come in and be destructive.
Lucas Ihlein: This team, this interdisciplinary research team of artists, geographers and social scientists, has previously worked in the context of the Great Barrier Reef. So it’s islands and the constantly changing shape of coral, small coral islands, has been a point of focus for this group previously. In this project we’ve brought our focus more locally, which gives us the opportunity to join that interesting coastal geomorphology to our local community connections here.
Robyn Williams: Yeah, indeed. And have you actually had a few gatherings here over the last few days? Have you watched people, how they behave?
Leah Gibbs: We have had some gatherings. It’s been terrific fun. We had an opening event, but we think there were somewhere between 150 and 200 people here, which was lovely. There was a beautiful moment where I walked around this corner and I saw about 50 people standing transfixed by this beautiful image, probably mostly local people who know this place, as we said, but who were just transfixed by seeing this place from a different perspective. So that was really terrific.
Since then, we’ve had some of our colleagues who teach on campus bring their students into the room, bring their postgraduate research groups and respond to the space in different kinds of ways. So, for instance, Sarah’s coastal geomorphology colleagues have come in and thought about the place in relation to their research interests. I believe we’re having some colleagues who are working on the visual arts, on watercolour, on a bunch of other kinds of areas of study and teaching, to come into the space and use the space as a prompt to think differently.
Another thing that we’ve got is over in the corner is a Pyrex box that’s quite jam-packed at the moment with folded pieces of paper. And those folded pieces of paper are responses from members of the public, responses to prompts that we’ve written down. So prompts such as ‘tell us a story about Wollongong’, or ‘how does this place make you feel’, or, my favourite, which is ‘imagine you’re a pelican, tell us about this place’. And people have responded to those and they’re sharing their stories.
So one of the things we really want to do with the exhibition is invite people into this space from the university community, from the broader community, and to reflect and share their impressions with us.
Robyn Williams: May I just tell you a personal story to finish with and get your response? When I first came here in 1964, so it’s a sort of anniversary, I was rather disappointed in the landscape and the forests and all the rest, it looked like there was scrub from the north to the south, because I was trained on the temperate forests of Europe. And it was only about a year later that I suddenly began to look properly at the difference and the subtlety. And that process of observation is not only something which is for an artist, it’s for the scientist to see what is there, and, you know, the whole world, as they say, in a grain of sand.
Leah Gibbs: Absolutely, I think that’s so true. The Australian landscapes are so diverse, and it takes time for us to get to know them and to learn and appreciate the nuances. One of the things that we wanted to do with this bit of slow TV, if you like, is to give people that space to slow down and observe and see what they find. Another thing that I’m really interested in here is what’s happening beneath the water’s surface. This is a mysterious place for many of us, and I’m sure that you know, Robyn, that what’s beneath the water’s surface here is just wonderful. We have these amazing kelp forests which are equally as significant as the Great Barrier Reef, but a really different ecosystem. So I want this film to open up people’s curiosity about what lies beneath the waves as well. Those kelp forests are degrading really rapidly as a result of all sorts of climate change processes and environmental changes of different sorts, and we’re really keen to open people’s eyes to start to appreciate them in different ways.
Robyn Williams: Thank you.
Leah Gibbs: You’re welcome.
Robyn Williams: City+Sea is an exhibition now on at the University of Wollongong Gallery. I was with Leah Gibbs (geographer) and Lucas Ihlein (artist). And the Dr Williams they mentioned was also involved, as was Professor Sarah Hamylton.