Sue's Blog

This is the view of the back of the Broken Hill Art Exchange with a full moon rising.

So far Lorna has done all the work on this blog.She is a superior communicator. I will add a few words even though it is now after the main event and we are both home again with our memories.

It was a surprise to me to find beauty in the industrial landscape of Broken Hill. Visually, it is a very interesting place indeed if you can allow yourself to look at all the strange mining structures and electrictiy cables rather than trying to view the lanscape through them.What a bizarre thing to do though, digging up all that earth and then dumping it somewhere else.The scale of this work is astonishing and the impact on the local society one way and another and on the growth of Australia we have only just begun to understand.

Visits to the nearby National Parks were a treat.I have been to the outback before so the colours and shape of the natural landscape were not a surprise to me  but I loved it all once again. The morning and evening light add a certain quality to it. The big question is how to speak about it in my own voice as a visual artist. This will be the challenge in the studio over the next few months.

The Broken Hill Art Exchange was a good and stimulating place to be and I would recommend it as a residency to other artists. We mixed with a number of other artists and as our brief required of us we exchanged information with a number of artists, some of whom are planning a trip to the coast now. Nice for us to find ouselves among photographers and video artists, musicians and poets. The moon came up at sunset on our final evening. Pictured here is the back of the Art Exchange, not yet renovated. The front and the interiors of the studios are quite comfortable.This would have been a very flash shopping centre in the 1950s.