Forest Keegel

Respected Elder and Master Weaver Aunty Marilyne Nicholls and Forest Keegel have been collaborating on art projects in the landscape, with communities and on Dja Dja Wurrung Country since 2017.

Marilyne Nicholls was born in Swan Hill, Victoria and is a multi clan woman who has Ancestral and cultural connections to fresh water and salt water Country: Dja Dja Wurrung, Barrappa Barrappa, Yorta Yorta, Watti Watti, Latji Latj, Yulpagulp and Ngarrindjeri.

Marilyne was encouraged at an early age by her mother to use native plants for weaving and to create feather flowers in a traditional and contempary manner. She has an interest in environmental issues and was taught by her father where native plants grow.

She has been teaching weaving techniques and feather craft skills for over 20 years, she has had multiple exhibitions and won the Victorian Indigenous Art Award. Marilyne’s weaving and feather craft has taken her on many journeys overseas to the Festival of Pacific Arts as part of the Australian Delegation to the Soloman Islands, The Long Walk’ weavers exchange program in Wadeye Northern Territory and the Weavers Exchange Program in NZ.

Aunty Marilyne is a recognised elder amongst her people, sharing her knowledge, skills and stories with grace. She has worked as a nurse and Aboriginal social, emotional, spiritual and physical health support in the hospital system for over 20 years. She is now working for the Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation as a Rivers and Water Health Project Officer.

View a short video on the design files here

https://thedesignfiles.net/2018/05/marilyne-nicholls-weaver

https://www.centralgoldfields.vic.gov.au/Council/News-Media/Gallery-announces-acquisition-of-a-new-artwork-by-Aunty-Marilyne-Nicholls

https://www.daao.org.au/bio/marilyne-nicholls/biography/

Collaboration with Aunty Marilyne Nicholls

Aunty Marilyne Nicholls and Forest Keegel set up camp at Vaughan Springs for a week in December 2018 to make Snake in the Landscape. A caring for Country art installation encouraging a healthy river system in the form of a snake curved along the edge of the river bank. Created from a lattice of sticks, tied together with natural fibre string. The sticks formed a sculptural cage over plantings of Basket Grass, Hemarthria uncinata Mat Grass, Lomandra filiformis Wattle Mat-rush, the roots of which will stabilise the eroding bank. Over the course of a week the artists removed weeds from the site, explored the catchment and collected sticks and planted Common Reed and other rhizome plants in the riparian zone to clean and filter the water. People joined them creating the finishing touches to the snake at the Vaughan Springs Family Fun Day

Treechange Vaughan Springs 2018

Orchestra of Extinction is a long term project in which Keegel and her collaborator sound artist Amanda King explore the habitat of threatened species and record sound and video footage to be housed in an old radiogram cabinets that are encrusted with residues of the species habitat such as varnish made from plant saps and resins. Each of these cabinets become an archive for a particular species forming a record of what King and Keegel have learnt about them through research, time walking and recording in their habitat and speaking with scientists and local experts.

A contemporary interpretation of a Cabinet of Curiosities or Wunderkammer that highlights extinction and vulnerability of threatened species and brings the recorded habitats in to a historic house Colonial setting. Species included in the project include

Malleefowl, Leipoa ocellata Wotjobaluk Country-Little Desert and Wimerra/Mallee-

Bush Stone-curlew Burhinus grallarius (Dja Dja Wurrung Country Central Victoria)

Powerful Owl Ninnox stupenda - Dja Dja Wurrung Country (Central Victoria)

Duan, Brush Tailed Phascogale, Phascogale tapoatafa tapoatafa - Dja Dja Wurrung Country (Central Victoria)

Kaparunina, Thylacine/Tiger, Thylacinus cynocephalus and Purinina Tasmanian Devil, Sarcophilus harrisii- Lutruwita takanya Tasmania

Alberts Lyrebird Menura alberti- Widjabul Wia-bal Country, Bundjalung Nation, (Terania Basin Night Cap Ranges Northern NSW)

First 4 images photographed by Glen Miller

2012 MoreArt, Moreland Statio

Hundreds of discarded water cups, collected from Vline trains, arranged in the shape of the Merri Creek and Moonee Ponds Creek catchments. Which once riffled through reed beds and ephemeral tributaries flowing a natural course with fresh drinking water and teeming with aquatic life. Storm water now surges through gutters and main drains, then back to the creeks with sludge and rubbish caught in its wake.

Overkill, 2018

Antibacterial cleaner bottles, beeswax, dirt, latex, clay, horse hair, 
320 x 305 x 450 mm

Overkill is an art work that Forest and Alison Burton made together for a gallery for children in the Trocadero building in Footscray- little NO BIG.

They covered bottles of “germ killing” antibacterial cleaners and handwash with mostly natural things. The bottles now look like something that the ads for “germ-killing” cleaners tell us we should be frightened of. Overkill, questions why the ads make the germs scary rather than help us understand why so many germs live with us and how we can best live with them.

Exploring the artwork

Can you tell which bottles of cleaners and soaps have used to make Overkill? Maybe you have some at home. Name ones that you know out loud.

Making an artwork together is called collaborating. Can you tell who did what?

Many germs are actually good for us: helping us digest our food, making oxygen for us to breath and looking after our skin. Draw a picture of what you think one of these helpful germs looks like.

Germs and people
Germs are really tiny bacteria, viruses, fungi and protozoa. You need a microscope to see them. There are billions of them on your skin, insides and everywhere. Our bodies are pretty good at using their immune system to stop germs making us sick. You can help by washing away most germs with soap and water without using “germ-killing” cleaners.

Using special “germ-killing” cleaners always leaves a few thousand survivors. As germs multiply very fast, the chances of the germ babies growing a “resistance” to the antibacterial cleaners or antibiotics is very high. Helping resistant germs to grow means that soon we won’t be able to kill them in hospitals either. And that can mean the hospitals won’t be able to make sick people better.

Tip 
Bubble gloves - Every time you wash your hands practice making gloves with the soap bubbles before your rinse them off.

Creating an enduring physical object has not been a focus of my practice but with site responsive works in the landscape there are often a few elements for me to remove from the site, a box of paper cups, a crate of money bags that were once filled with sand, a cluster of paper bags tied together with string. It is these relics of projects that were  recontextualised in winter 2014 at Unicorn Lane Gallery as remnant topographies in Surveyed. Detritus from 2004-2014 which were shown with QR code links to a website showing images of the work in its original context.

MoreArt 2010 and Catlemaine Festival 2011

Bespoke nest hollows woven from newspapers discarded on the Upfield line. It takes trees 100+ years to develop hollows so competition is fierce amongst introduced and threatened Victorian birds, bats and arboreal mammals.

Old growth and plantation timbers  are pulped – made into paper – printed and peddled as the latest news- discarded...then shredded, ready to weave into bespoke homes for birds, micro bats and pygmy possums.

Many endangered and unique Victorian birds and arboreal mammals rely on hollows in dead and living trees as nests to live and breed in.

 2014 Lorne Sculpture Biennale

Winner of Sculpturescape award

In this grotesque cycle of life trees provide wood pulp, that with an immense amount of energy and water is manufactured into paper bags, transported and generally used only once, often for a mere moment. A discardable husk, a plain wrapper masquerading as an environmentally responsible choice, a memento of a purchase, a signifier of branding. They become a colony of discarded paper bags, limpeting on to branches and forming lunglike growths in the crevasses of tree trunks. Each bag is venerated for its palimpsest of previous use, translucent indelible creases and stains and revered for its new vessel like suggestive form.

2012

Memorials to extinct Victorian species with the dates of when they were first  and last recorded by Europeans naturalists. The work was made from rubbings of multiple headstones in Central Victorian goldfields cemeteries.

2013

An image of the Toolache Wallaby headstone was exhibited in What lies beneath in Art Gallery of Ballarat Backyard 

2013 Artfields, Caslemaine Market Building

A colony of discarded paper bags- twisted, scrunched, re-formed and bound with string. Prompting us to question our consumption and discarding of resources.

Hundreds of bags twisted in a uniform manner evidencing a palimpsest of previous use- stained, creased, greasy, much folded, worn soft like a well washed fabric. Traces of oil leaving translucent indelible marks.

2011 Lorne Sculpture Sculpture Trail

Medium – Calico cash bags, Indigenous coastal grasses – Austrofestuca littoralis (Coast Fescue), Carex pumila (Strand Sedge), raw sheep fleece, sand, ink.

The search for the fabled inland sea...a response to living in Central Victoria, a long way from the ocean, where rivers and floodwaters creep northwards. Grassy woodlands of Victoria were razed to grow flour and get rich off the sheep’s back...sacks of flour and bales of wool – the wealth of the land bagged up and shipped offshore...stacks of Sandbags, holding swollen rivers at bay...fortifying homes….rainfall west of the Great Dividing Range flows northward, making its way into the Murray River and eventually out to sea through the Coorong in South Australia….sandbags used in an attempt to halt the ocean encroaching on the shore eating away the land...land degradation, overgrazing and salination – leads to soil washing and blowing away, with no roots to hold it in place.

2011 Lorne Sculpture Sculpturescape

Flyways – Invisible highways in the sky followed by migratory sea birds as they seasonally loop in a figure eight from Siberia to Southern Australia. Engaging beach-goers in the creation of shelter and refuge for sand nesting and migratory birds. This work aims to highlight the vulnerability, as well as the need for protection and shelter during breeding season when Hooded Plovers and other sand nesting birds lay eggs on the beach above the high tide mark so their chicks can feed at the water’s edge. The beaches they rely on are also frequented by humans, dogs and feral predators. 

2011 Yarra Sculpture Gallery and Lot 19

Heater Coil

A group of steel springs from a couch that ended it's days on a verandah. Being urinated on by a sheep was the catalyst for it to be smashed to pieces and burnt in a bonfire. All that was left were the springs.

These springs were repurposed into heater coil, raw fleece was adhered with beeswax in fluffy flame like tufts. Steel wool was woven through the springs, when steel rusts the molecular change of the oxidisation process gives off heat. Vinegar was been applied to the steel wool to accelerate the rusting process.

Spring Coil was the next iteration of the work,-  the fleece tufted steel springs formed tree guards for indigenous grass species, placed in a cluster outside.

Unintended Consequences #2 Great Scientific discoveries that 

destroyed the world-: Generating power from fossil fuels.

Coal (borrowed from Victorian Goldfields Railway) sand, Kurrajong seed pods. Plants endemic to Melbournes sandbelt Microseris lanceolata Myrnong Yam Daisy, Stylidium graminfolium Grass trigger plant, Distichlis distichophylla Australian salt grass, Austrostipa stipoides Prickly Spear Grass, Clematis microphylla Small-leafed Clematis, Hardenbergia violacea Native Sarparilla.

30+ million years- the time it took for the giant forest in Gippsland to decompose in swamps and form into brown coal.

84 years of coal fuelled gas production since1873

132 years-Forever heavy metal and groundwater contamination since 1873

29 years Gasworks Art Park since1986

South Melbourne Gas Plant was built in 1873 to generate power with coal shipped in by boat. The industrial use of the site contaminated the groundwater and soil with heavy metals, Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from tar and oil wastes, General hydrocarbons from tar and oil wastes and storages; Various metals including arsenic from concentrations of coal minerals; Cyanide, sulphates and sulphides from gas purification and waste water treatment; Phenols from tar wastes; Monocyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (MAHs) including but not limited to benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylenes; Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) associated with the substations and Solvents associated with maintenance.

Thank you to St Kilda Indigenous Nursery Cooperative and Victorian Goldfields Railway for generous sponsorship

2003    Stony Creek Environmental Art Event City of Maribyrnong     

Members of the public viewed samples of Stony Creek water and water from a healthy creek teeming with life under a microscope with a Waterwatch educator and wrote messages to the creek to place in the bottle. The Chrysalis had domes printed with images of frog, fish and insect species indigenous to the site but no longer present

2003    Sustainable Living Festival Federation Square Melbourne

Solar pump operated grey water capillary irrigation system for raising indigenous aquatic plants that would have grown on the site. Featuring images of historic maps, scientific diagrams and botanical drawings inside bubbles encasing the plants.