Laura Wills CLOUDED

Artist Statement

This year I was the recipient of the Palace of Production, Country Arts SA, artist in residency at Emu Bay Kangaroo Island. This enabled me to spend four weeks on the island researching and developing new works. These works form part of an ongoing investigation with Kangaroo Island. They explore relationship to place.  A landscape post fires, I observed the epicormic growth of trees and saw strong plants that have been in the soil waiting for smoke activation to grow. The drawings speak of my perception, looking at seeds, trees, leaves, soil, all changing with time, season, fire etc. What is their story and how does it relate to my own?

James Tylor and I have made recent works exploring untold histories of Kangaroo Island. We collaborate on works that merge our own experiences of Australian colonial history by combining drawings into photographic images. Hidden Landscape, Kangaroo Island is our latest series that explores the History of Kangaroo Island particularly the early sealers and Aboriginal Tasmanian women who lived there before European white settlement. This project between an Indigenous and a Non-Indigenous Australian artist helps to find a way to decolonise the telling of stories about Australian frontier history in mainstream society in Australia.