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MAGNETIC TOPOGRAPHIES contribution to Fauvette Exhibition

Looped video installed below trapdoor, screen printed posters produced during community workshop, wall painting

Acknowledgements: Thank you to everyone who contributed to the creation of this work, including all those who attended our community screen printing workshop. Special thanks to: Jaime Emily Powell, Sofia Houghton, Richard Manner, Les Prest, and Frontyard, Marrickville.


Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Scholarship 2024 (Mid-Career/Established Category) 

MAGNETIC TOPOGRAPHIES (Clare Britton, Kenzee Patterson and Therese Keogh) invites audience members to take a screen-printed poster directly from the wall. These posters were printed during a workshop we hosted in August this year at Frontyard, Marrickville. The posters register the many hands who participated in the making of this work, and the creative conversations that took place alongside its production.

As posters are removed from the wall, a painted shape is gradually revealed, evoking the formation of Sydney’s sandstone geology, on Gadigal Land. The gradient depicted contains a loose mapping of the ancient movement of water and aggregate material from what is now Broken Hill, on Wilyakali Country, into the Sydney Basin, from which the thick bedrock of this city, and the University’s many buildings are constituted. The imagery included within the posters, and accompanying video work, documents the flooded basement of the nearby John Woolley Building, highlighting the continuing relationship between sandstone and water in this place.

The three texts included in this work are what we term provocations for practice; sentences inviting creative consideration of place-based relations. MAGNETIC TOPOGRAPHIES, Slag Heap Projects and Astrida Neimanis composed these provocations, and together they will guide the emplaced, creative work we do together.

An ethos of collectivity permeates through MAGNETIC TOPOGRAPHIES’ work, and as part of our ongoing commitment to developing modes of creative practice that are responsive and accountable to ‘place’—peoples, histories, and ecologies.