Police Point Shire Park AiR

In June 2022 I was awarded a 2 week residency at Police Point Shire Park near Monmar (Point Nepean)..

I would like to thank the MornPen Arts and Culture Team for believing in me and granting me this transformative artist residency.

In 2023 I won a major national prize with work I made during this residency, the Klytie Pate Ceramic Award which significantly changed the course of my creative practice.

I have had a home on the Mornington Peninsula for the past 30 years and it is an essential part of my existence. I live very close to Police Point Shire Park and have spent some of every day of every Victorian lockdown there, in the early light, the bright sun, the wind and teeming rain, the twilight, the whispering darkness. I know it intimately. I have recorded the motifs which appear there; I have written about it; I have been inspired by the multiple levels of temporality existing in the park; the geology, the indigenous, the settler, the sky, the fauna and flora, layered in a complex set of still evolving relationships. I am captivated by the well and the secrets it holds. Police Point Shire Park holds many stories and during the AiR I made a series of works out of clay. The motifs and themes running through the park infiltrated my creative practice. Police Point Shire Park will always be an important part of my practice as I continue to attempt to unfold some of its complexities.

I continue to research, document and develop ideas around Police Point Shire Park. With a working title “The Calling Ground” my projects tease out some of the stories that whisper around us in the park. There is an obvious connection to Q(q)uarantine experienced both historically and right now. The stories call for us to be attentive to the relationships between the formation of the local limestone, the gatherings of indigenous people, the dolphin sanctuary, the colonists, the disease(s), the erosion of the cliffs, the embedded lime kilns, law and order, planned subdivisions thwarted by local activism and the list goes on.

This is a valuable and ongoing project, not just for me, but for the Mornington Peninsula Shire to know that there is continued recognition, examination and interpretation of the history of the park. This residency was transformative for my creative practice. I hope that I will have an opportunity to spend more time there in the future, in an official capacity, but in the meantime I will continue my obsession with making work inspired by Police Point Shire Park.