Whip out your calendars, chums! There's a rad new exhibition happening west of Sydney that you might want to slot into your holiday schedule.

From November 30th to February 9th, the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre and curator Hayley Zena Poynton are hosting Cunning Revived – a magical exhibition that explores bodily autonomy and aims to promote collective change. Nine artists, including Daisy Beattie, Tamara Elkins, Gianna Hayes, Emily Hunt, Adriana Māhanga Lear, Hayley Millar Baker and Justine Youssef, will display works that utilise past and present craft techniques, and that engage in sacred processes like ritual and ceremony. As part of the exhibition, the Cultural Centre will also host a range of craft and social programs, including Talisman making, eco-dyeing, artists talks and an activity grimoire.

We caught up with two of Cunning Revived's exhibiting artists, Yvette Hamilton and Katy B Plummer, to find out more about this ace project.Image: Yvette Hamilton, Things I Can't See from Places I Can't See: Elizabeth Fulhame. 2024. Gold toned salt print on cotton rag, from AI generated image. 43 x 59cm. Photo by Bee Elton

YVETTE HAMILTON
What is your earliest experience with art? I was first taken into a darkroom when I was three years old, and while I can’t remember that experience, I think it must have made an impression on me! I certainly remember the exact moment of seeing my first image appear on photographic paper when I was 18 and in the darkroom during the first few weeks of my fine art degree. It was the most stunning experience I’d ever had – a sense of wonder and coming home. In terms of looking to other artists, I had a poster of Jenny Watson’s “Wings of Desire” on my wall from about the age of 12. I think I must have bought it from the art gallery gift shop and that amazing work was a touchstone for many years!

You mention that you use your art to “see the unseen and to materialise the invisible”. Can you elaborate on how you do this? I’m an artist who works with photography in an expanded manner, and the idea of seeing the unseen is something that has been tied to photography since its invention. We’ve always used photography to extend human vision, whether that’s into the sky to capture enormous astronomical phenomena, or to train focus on the tiniest details of something too small to see. However, photographic vision is always haunted by the unseen – that which lies outside of the edge of the frame. My approach is all about questioning what is visible and questioning vision itself, so I mostly work without a camera and attend to the edge of vision and visual comprehension. This can take the form of working with laborious handcrafted historical photographic techniques that rely on light falling on light-sensitive surfaces, or very immaterial processes such as AI imaging prompts that emerge from invisible data sets.

Tell us about the pieces you’re showing at Cunning Revived. The work that I’m showing is a series called Things I Can’t See From Places I Can’t Be (Elizabeth Fulhame at work). The work ‘conjures’ images of the little-known British chemist Elizabeth Fulhame, who was working in the 18th and 19th centuries. Her experimentations with silver and light were instrumental in laying the foundations of the photographic medium. Like many women of her time – and let’s be honest, even now – her work has not received the attention it deserved. While she published her work in 1794, we don’t know when she was born or when she died, and there are certainly no images of her. After poring over the details about her experiments in her only publication, “An Essay on Combustion: With a View to a New Art of Dyeing and Painting”, I used AI to create speculative images of her hands at work. In these, I tried to imagine the room that she would have worked in, the clothes she might have been wearing, and what her hands may have looked like. I then printed these AI images using the very laborious salt printing process, which was the first paper-bound photographic process that was invented in the late 1830s. This process involves using silver, gold and salt to create images – the whole technique is based on the information that she uncovered in her experiments approximately 50 years prior. Making the prints this way brought me into an embodied relationship with her work and my ‘conjuring’ aims to pay homage to her amazing legacy.

If your art could talk, what would it say? I’m not exactly sure what my work would say, but it aims to urge the viewer to look longer and slower. Perhaps the best words I could impart belong to Elizabeth Fulhame herself, and I think they are an excellent guide for anyone attempting something difficult or creative: “For this little bark of mine has weathered out full many a storm, and stemmed the boisterous tide; and though the cargo be not rich, the dangers which may hereafter be portrayed on votive tablet, may serve as a beacon to future mariners.” (Elizabeth Fulhame – “An Essay on Combustion: With a View to a New Art of Dying and Painting”.)Image: Katy B Plummer, THE CAILLEACH STILL KNOWS YOU, AFTER ALL 2023, 4K digital video 5.00 minute, painted calico, cotton velvet, painted stools. Photo by Kuba Dorabialski.

KATY B PLUMMER
How did you become a professional artist? I have been an artist since I finished high school, but I took about 10 years off when my kids were little. When I started working again, it was easy to pick my practice up where I left off, but it was a shock to realise that I had to completely restart my career from scratch! That happened about 10 years ago, so I feel like I am just now starting to hit my stride.

What have been the biggest inspirations for the development of your style? My mother was a ballerina before I was born, and dressing up in her costumes were my first experiences as an artist. I would see a dress, a fancy fabric or accessory and have an immediate vision of a character or scenario springing out of it. I would put on complicated plays with my younger siblings (which never matched up to my vision), and then in high school I was really into musical theatre. When I was older, I became a painter, because I really like working alone on my own projects (which is hard to do in theatre!) but when I finally went to art school, all my paintings started becoming ‘characters’ in these big narrative installations that I thought of as ‘plays’. Video and performance became an important part of my work, and now, even though my work exists in a gallery context, I think of it more and more as a kind of theatre experience.

Your art falls into many mediums, like photography, video, crochet and ceramics. Which is your favourite medium? I don’t really have a favourite. I want each work to become what it needs to be, and I want every aspect of it to be touched. The walls, the furniture, the floors. There is a word in German, ‘gesamtkunstwerk’, which literally means “total work of art”. This word is used to describe a way of working that includes all the art forms in one work – literature, music, dance, performance, architecture – and this is how I like working.

I like to make things with my hands. I can think more clearly if my body is busy with mountains of repetitive work. I still usually start with an idea for a character in a costume, just as I did when I was little, and I build a story while I make the clothes. Once the costume is made, I build the rest of the environment, and while I’m doing that, I let the story unwind and tell itself in my mind. I like to work with people nowadays; my partner is my videographer, and I work with composers and performers and choreographers. I love to build a vision and then share it with brilliant, highly trained people and see what they bring to it.

Talk to us about the piece you’re showing at Cunning Revived, “THE CAILLEACH STILL KNOWS YOU, AFTER ALL”. The Cailleach is the ancient Celtic Mother of All Gods. Deeply tied to land and seasons, there are traces of her everywhere in the landscapes of Scotland and Ireland. “THE CAILLEACH STILL KNOWS YOU, AFTER ALL” is a video work speaking directly to people of settler-colonial descent. It describes the spirit of restless extraction at the heart of imperialism. It suggests that this restless hunger springs from the severing of the reciprocal relationship between settlers and the ancient, land-based spirits who knew our ancestors by name.

What do you hope viewers get out of this? This work is a portal through which the Cailleach and the viewer behold each other, across time and space. From her stone hut (where she creates mountains and tends to winter) she reminds us that the earth is sentient, and that it requires care and exchange. She gazes urgently back at us, hoping we remember who we are, and hoping that she can soothe our homelessness and put us back into right relationship with the earth. I hope people will come, sit with her, eat one of her apples and feel their own land-based spirits stirring in their blood.

Catch Cunning Revived at the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre from November 30th, 2024, to February 9th, 2025.