SHUT UP MOUNTAIN
c3 Contemporary Art Space
 Abbotsford, Melbourne
April 2019

This work looks at the poetic: things known and felt but which evade direct visual perception and representation—unseen and unspoken experiences of actual and metaphorical sites and landscapes. How can these things be articulated in the material?
The exhibition Shut Up Mountain develops from an investigation into Berlin’s Trümmerberg sites, rubble-mountains made up of debris from the second World War.  The work is a meditation on the artist's experience and the characteristics and ideas embodied in and by these landscapes: mountains in disguise, they speak of contradictions between the transient, enduring and fragmented aspects of lived experience, less geological feature more ruin or monument, even architecture. They communicate the illusion of stability—impermanence dressed up as permanence, a mesh of disparate and intersecting components: materiality, time, space and meaning.
Shut Up Mountain is part of my PHD research that explores creative practice as a tool to bring these types of invisible experiences and information into vision and materiality for the viewer.  The work seeks to create slippages in linguistic and symbolic narratives and disrupt traditional categories of meaning through strategies of collage and spatial arrangement applied to objects, materials and images.

Words - Rebecca Delange
Photography - Aaron Christopher Rees