Berlin-based Melbourne artist Catherine Evans will receive a cash grant of $10,000 and undertake a residency at State Library Victoria as the 2017 recipient of the Georges Mora Fellowship.
Catherine Evans with her work Irrstern. Photograph: Piotr Pietrus
Evans will use the State Library Victoria collections to develop her most ambitious project to date, an installation artwork titled The View from Mount Disappointment.
Working across both photography and sculpture, Evans uses a vocabulary of everyday objects to create unexpected juxtapositions, such as the heavy rocks appearing to float against a wall of pink carpet in her work Irrstern. Her new work will employ similar techniques on a monumental scale to interrogate the ways individuals view history according to their spatio-temporal relationship to the land.
Catherine Evans, Irrstern. Photograph: Piotr Pietrus
The View from Mount Disappointment is inspired by the English naming of the Victorian mountain by two explorers in 1824. Hamilton Hume and William Hovell made the difficult journey to the summit hoping to be rewarded with a view of Port Phillip Bay. However on reaching the top, the view was completely obscured by trees. Evans’ research for the project will explore historical narratives around Mount Disappointment, particularly those that were previously overlooked, such as Indigenous perspectives.
Previous Georges Mora Fellows include James Geurts, Inez de Vega, Brook Andrew and Trent Walter, Linda Tegg, Ross Coulter, Philip Brophy, Cyrus Tang and Trinh Vu.
