- Title
- Wayfinding through shadowlands: making minescapes matter
- Creator
- Dunstan, Penelope
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2017
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- Open-cut coal mining in the Hunter Valley, NSW, is transforming what once was agricultural land into engineered lands of homogenized overburden hills and plains. Such places are the shadowlands of our consumer selves. As an artist, acknowledging the agency of newly created land to self-organise, regardless of the aspirations of humans, is an outworking of my philosophical understanding of New Materialism. The results of my research in the field include photography with and without lenses, drawing, earth and soil works, and painting, with each method capturing a story ‘told to me’ from the new land and allowing the agency of the non-human other to speak through a practice of co-operative artmaking. Post-mining land is considered by the mining community to be rehabilitated once vegetation has established, but in this research I argue that land cannot be considered fully rehabilitated without a relationship to people. To enact this connection and to recover a storied sense of place, I use a methodology of walking as wayfinding where every footfall is an action of being-in new land, building history and restoring meaning. The place of art is to transmute tracks into images and interactions into writings, creating an interactive history for our shadowlands and making minescapes matter. This research contributes to a conversation between art and the mining industry, where each informs the other promoting discussion about legacy issues and the multiple possibilities of final landforms. The outcomes of this interdisciplinary fine art research into minescapes have been published and presented in fine arts, mining industry, geography, environmental history and photography forums. The artworks and exegesis make an original contribution to mining land rehabilitation.
- Subject
- Wayfinding; minescapes; installation; shadowland; opencut coal mining; rehabilitation; new materialism; Hunter Valley; fine art; photography; drawing
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1355422
- Identifier
- uon:31458
- Rights
- Copyright 2017 Penelope Dunstan
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 34 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 12 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |