Curator’s Essay
Essay Title
Circular Economies is an exhibition of new commissions by five local, national and international artists and collaborators, developed through a series of socially-engaged artist residencies across regional Western Australia from 2024 to 2026. Spanning photography, video, textiles and installation, the exhibition brings together works by Tarsh Bates and Susan Hauri-Downing, House of Natural Fiber, Ilona McGuire and Zali Morgan, Loren Kronemyer and Linda Tegg. Each artist or collaborative group spent up to twelve weeks in their residency community, supported by local organisations to engage with the unique social, cultural and ecological context.
Regional Western Australia is often understood through its relationship to resource extraction, agriculture and livestock, with material wealth flowing from rural areas to cities and offshore markets. Recent disruptions in global oil markets remind us that daily life is shaped by the fluctuations of these systems, from the price of fuel to the circulation of essential goods and labour. Circular Economies shifts attention toward less visible and often immaterial systems of exchange, to ask what other forms of value and exchange might sustain community life and contribute to the unique character of each place.
The resulting artworks respond to the rich fabric of knowledge, care and labour in regional Western Australia. A circular economy is a phrase borrowed from economics, where materials and resources recirculate, regenerate or are renewed within a closed-loop system with a view to eliminating waste. Each artist’s project extends this definition to incorporate cultural, ecological and social exchanges as key resources that circulate throughout communities over time. Ultimately, each artist’s project highlights relationships and community investment as the primary resource, rather than materials — the latter are only as rich as the relationships that sustain them.
In Western Australia, pastoral narratives of settlement and agricultural progress have often obscured the histories and continuing presence of First Nations peoples, who have cared for Country for millennia. During their residency in Carnamah, supported by North Midlands Project, artists and collaborators Ilona McGuire, a Bibbulman Noongar and Kangarakan woman, and Zali Morgan, a Whadjuk, Ballardong and Wilman Noongar woman, worked together to trace the presence of First Nations people within and beyond the town’s public memory. Both artists were struck by the lack of accessible information about the Aboriginal people of the area, as well as the displacement of these communities from Carnamah to neighbouring towns.
Harnessing the relentless sunlight that characterises the Wheatbelt landscape, McGuire and Morgan experimented with cyanotypes, using their own bodies to expose, both figuratively and literally, the ongoing presence of Aboriginal people in Carnamah. The resulting fabric cyanotypes form a shelter in the gallery, a visual assertion of presence that also evokes the feeling of exclusion that echoed throughout the town for the artists. In creating a structure that visitors can see but cannot enter, the work functions as a barrier between the audience and the obscured presence of Aboriginal people in Carnamah. In this way, McGuire and Morgan remind us that acknowledging and honouring histories — including the violent and the difficult — is necessary and vital work in shaping a community.
Indonesian artists Irene Agrivina and Haryo Hutomo, of the collective House of Natural Fiber, also position cultural knowledge as a key resource for regional communities, using material exploration as a vehicle for exchange. Agrivina and Hutomo spent their residency in Narrogin, supported by Arts Narrogin, working with Noongar artist Ross Storey to understand the significance of local pigments found in the area. Agrivina and Hutomo brought their own understanding of modern scientific processes into dialogue with the knowledge shared by Storey, presenting a series of material explorations using these pigments. Through fermentation, sonification and scent, the raw material of the pigment becomes activated in the gallery. This project highlights the ways in which each residency project benefits from reciprocal exchange from visiting artists and local community members. The artists gained a deeper understanding of the role of ochres as knowledge carriers across generations, whilst making visible the scientific processes of transformation occurring daily beneath the Earth’s surface. Together, this process is made visible for the audience, highlighting the role of stories, knowledge and memories that transform matter.
Linda Tegg’s residency project in Carnarvon, supported by the Shire of Carnarvon, examines the pace at which different resources move, change and endure. Drawing on Carnarvon’s history as a communications centre in the 1969 moon landing and its Space and Technology Museum tourist attraction, Tegg traces the role of communications technology in the town’s daily life and through its skies. The continuous presence of communications satellites in the skies brings increased connectivity to regional towns such as Carnarvon. However, it also obscures the constellations in the night sky, including dark constellations of particular cultural importance to the Yinggarda people. During her residency Tegg invited locals to trace the paths of these satellites onto the earth’s surface using seagrass on tidal flats. The resulting photographic work invites appreciation of the slow-moving, gentle transformations occurring on the earth’s surface alongside the rapid movement and relatively short lifespan of communications satellites. By placing satellite trails alongside seagrass and the movement of the tides, Tegg asks audiences to consider what forms of connection are gained, what forms are obscured, and what slower resources might be needed to sustain a community into the future.
This concern with slow transformation continues in Tarsh Bates and Susan Hauri-Downing’s residency with Beverley Station Arts, Beverley. In their project, Bates and Hauri-Downing engaged with scent as a way to register the ecological and emotional dimensions of place. Through a series of community workshops and walks, locals are asked to imagine how Beverley might smell in the future as the climate becomes hotter and drier, and how this will impact their sense of place. Here, scent becomes an archive of memories as well as a warning for the future, asking what might be lost as the climate irrevocably changes. Bates and Hauri-Downing expand the idea of a resource beyond the material, showing how sensory knowledge can help communities understand and appreciate the unique character of a place, how it is changing, and what might need protecting in the future.
As an artist whose practice often focuses on learning new skills for survival, Loren Kronemyer’s project is similarly attentive to the role of resources in the future. During her residency with Cannery Arts Centre, Esperance, Kronemyer connected with the four sport shooting clubs in the town with the goal of making an ethical gun. Starting with the material resources that move through Esperance’s economy, she sourced e-waste from the community, using the copper as her material. Her project engages with the role Esperance plays in mining and shipping metals offshore, which return to consumers in the form of cheap electronics that can’t be easily recycled. Developing copper bullets from this material highlights the ethics involved in both the mining of precious metals and the role of guns and shooting in a regional community. Both are activities that can contribute to livelihoods, economic growth and the development of vital community relationships focused on a common interest, but are fraught with issues of environmental and social impacts. Kronemyer’s project also acknowledges that communities are not necessarily unified, and that shared interests can exist alongside conflicting values, priorities and relationships to place.
At Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA), these site-responsive works reframe regional Western Australia beyond its familiar position as a source of raw materials for global markets. Across Carnamah, Narrogin, Carnarvon, Beverley and Esperance, the artists consider resources beyond the material — cultural knowledge, sensory memory, ecological awareness, shared skills and reciprocity. These resources circulate between artists and communities, across generations, and between people and environments. In this sense, the residency model itself becomes a form of circular exchange: artists contribute their skills, methods and practices while local communities share their own knowledge, histories and perspectives in return.
Circular Economies asks what becomes possible when value is understood through these relationships rather than through extraction alone. The works reveal that the material resources associated with regional Western Australia are inseparable from the social, cultural and ecological systems that give places and communities a sense of identity. The resulting works respond to the economies of knowledge, care, memory and labour in regional Western Australia, whilst providing new perspectives on the tangible resources that define this state to the global economic order. By bringing these less visible economies into view, the exhibition invites us to understand the value of a place not only through what it can produce or export, but through what its communities are able to share, remember and sustain.