The Portal

Scone Museum & The Upper Hunter Historical Society

Immersive Film & Community Art Engagement

I was very grateful and lucky to be welcomed by the community of Scone to work on this project. Funded by Create NSW, I worked closely with the Museum, Historical Society and school children, facilitating animation and storytelling workshops with the kids and listening to the many oral history stories of the museum and local area to create this immersive work for the Museum and the community.

In the world of new technologies and consuming digital culture, Scone Museum and Historical society has a physical and material presence. Like an internet search engine’s flood of images and objects, knowledge and people but tangible and real. Photographs, graphic design, books, embroidery, dresses, letters, documentation, everyday objects and the space itself – in every collected item clues to unravel the stories of a settler community.

In this flood of images and objects, knowledge and people, we also find the missing – First Nations, the poor, women, the original environment, missing documentation and other material evidence lost or fragmented through time. The gaps hold a history of social structures and conflict.

In response, I have woven stories together using the materiality of photographs, glass plate negatives, fabrics, text and sound to construct a world that appears and disappears – a fleeting sense of never quite having the whole picture. The sound design by Gary Sinclair adds the layer of the space itself as words of former inmates of the lockup echo over the unfolding chaos of text, images and at times the emptiness and the missing. An echo of life or lives lived.