Fens Laboratorium for Dear Agnes project at Tuganina Explosives Reserve Altona

photo by Damjan Janevski

Fens Labroratorium, Overlapping Collective video by Anna Brownfield of artwork created for Hobsons Bay City Council, Deakin and RMIT at Truganina Explosives Reserve by Annee Miron and Forest Keegel in response to Agnes Denis artwork A Forest for Australia

In early 2023 Overlapping Collective came together with Hobsons Bay City Council to make their first artwork: Fens Laboratorium. Their invitation was to respond to an environmental artwork by Agnes Denes: Forest for Australia, planted nearby in 1998.

Overlapping Collective – Fens Laboratorium was a live multi-media artwork in which community members were invited to participate. A fen is an area of wetland vegetation that receives its water by both rainfall and groundwater flow, and in which the summer water table is at or below the surface of the sediment. (Oxford Reference, 2023). Seen as unremarkable, the local Truganina swamp, Cheetham Wetlands and their salt marshes Overlapping Collective found them exquisite. They offered fragments of what has been cared for by the Bunurong people for millennia. And continue to offer hope.

Overlapping Collective began with research and making art walks into these special watery places. We came to feel connected to them. Paying attention and learning from the others: plants, animals, landforms, water and weather. Then during the 3 week exhibition we created a live studio. This was based in the old laboritories of the Truganina Explosives Reserve.

In one lab we installed the common reed (Phragmites Australis) harvested from the local wetlands. This installation gave visitors a sense of the nearby wetlands. It triggered memories, stories and connections. It did this for people who grew up locally. It also did this for people from Greece and the Ukraine where Phragmites Australis also grows.

In the second laboratory we set up our research, references and art explorations. Then we filled the deck between the labs with tubestock and potted indigenous plants from the area. Visitors were invited to take at least 3 plants to adopt into their own homes. When doing this we asked them to consider what plants liked to grow together in nature. And what would suit the conditions around their home.

We invited visitors to join us for a few moments, on an art walk, or in another activity. We offered permission to take time in nature, to feel it with all the senses. And to respond by drawing, writing, photographing and making with us. And to find the possibility of how might you give something back to the land that cares for them.

Images of Fens Labroratorium by Matto Lucas courtesy of Hobsons Bay City Council

Approaching the *Phragmities Australis-* Common Reed installation in the explosives lab. A small hut is visible through the trees, inside it is hundred of common reed stalks, it smells fresh and grassy.

Approaching the *Phragmities Australis-* Common Reed installation in the explosives lab, which has an open door so people can enter the installation via a raised wooden boardwalk. There are reeds filling the space inside the hut as if they have pushed up through the floor and they are also dangling from the guttering and in the space between the two explosives lab huts. there is a bundle of reeds on the boardwalk and a table with tubestock plants from Newport Lakes Nursery.

Close up of a mass of the common reed inside the lab, with detail of florescence/seed heads bowing their dainty heads and pale green stroppy leaves and the strong bamboo like stalks of the reeds.

Visitors to Fens Labroratorium are talking in an animated way with the artists. A man in checked shirt, sunglasses and bucket hat, with grey hair and beard is leaning slightly backewards with his left hand raised in conversation with a woman in a white dress with green spots and black rimmed glasses that is gesticulating towards him. Artist annee Miron in orange dear Agnes t-shirt is sitting on a chair with a pen in her hand and a clipboard with maps of the creek walking trails on her lap. Behind her in a vase stalks of common reed reach from the floor to the ceiling and there are 2 wooden trestle tables with books, tools and pieces of reed, straws and glassware that is the live studio workspace for Overlapping Collectives Fens Studios. Artist Forest Keegel also in the orange artist t-shirt is looking on.

Close up of the people described above looking at the creek walking trails map on Annee’s lap

Images of Fens Labroratorium by Annee Miron and Forest Keegel

Overlapping Collective Bio

Overlapping Collective is so named for the areas of practice and approach that artists Annee Miron and Forest Keegel have in common. When they first sat down 3 years ago to map out how they might work together to form a collective they drew a series of circles that overlapped in the form of a venn diagram to find their common purpose.

Annee and Forest first connected in 2011 through the Rudder Exchange Visual Arts Mentoring Partnerships which Forest was facilitating and Annee was a mentor in, they had coincidentally both been selected as finalists in the Lorne Sculpture Biennale that year and have since had a strong alliance and many art adventures together, visiting each other on residencies, supporting each other in the studio, walking, drawing, camping and visiting exhibitions together.