A Nest in the Hills: A Symbiosis of Women & Birds in Australian Contemporary Art, 2025/26, by Mudgee Arts Precinct curator, Lizzy Galloway
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Aleshia [Lonsdale] also introduced me to multimedia artist, Kim V. Goldsmith for the 2022 exhibition, Ngayirr Ngurambang: Sacred Country. Kim’s video and sound work, featuring the Goulburn River, was a memorable contribution to this exhibition. When Kim was visiting Mudgee around a year ago, we had a conversation about the forthcoming exhibition focusing on women and birds, and she mentioned some exhibitions to which she had contributed, where birds were featured as an indicator of an environment’s health in relation to climate change – literally the canary in the coal mine.
Interestingly, we also discussed how the raven featured heavily in folklore in many regions around the world. She had done a fascinating project called Eye of the Corvus: Messenger of Truth, which looked at the significance of the crow to both the Icelandic and Wiradjuri culture, elucidating the important role that this particular bird has in two polar opposite cultures.
For this exhibition, Kim’s work comprises a field recorded soundscape featuring the sound of the Australian raven. Drawing on the work of Australian ecofeminist and philosopher, Val Plumwood, she explores the raven and its persecution, despite being highly intelligent birds. In many European traditions the raven is a bad omen or a sinister presence, but in Plumwood’s terms, it is a neighbour and an agent: a clever, observant creature making a living alongside us, not just a dark symbol on the horizon. Around Australian homes, ravens are comfortable in both the urban and rural contexts; they pick over bins, watch from powerlines, haunt school carparks and paddocks – always on the edge of domestic life; never quite ‘tame’ but always present.
Read through Plumwood’s gaze, this everyday presence starts to look a lot like women’s domestic labour: constant, intelligent, adaptive, but often dismissed as background ‘noise’. To ‘re-animate’ matter in her sense is to recognise that the raven’s harsh call is a voice, its scavenging is action and strategy, its willingness to live with us is a form of negotiation – a kind of running dialogue with our suburbs and farms.
As Goldsmith has said of her work:
Ravens of all species have been credited as way-finders, messengers, keepers of secrets, and talisman, also associated with bad luck, death and the dark arts. Despite or because of this, ravens and crows are one of the most persecuted birds in human history. The raven’s collective name includes an unkindness, a conspiracy, and a treachery, while a group of crows is commonly called a murder. It is indeed an unkindness.
Natured Space, 2011/12, by Merryn Spencer
Goldsmith’s photographic and installation work over the last few years has developed distinct characteristics – defiant, yet a joyous sensitivity overlaying the haunting images. This solo exhibition draws on her skills as a photographer and digital media artist through carefully planning, execution and installation of works on themes close to her heart.
Echoing her bold photographic images, Goldsmith entered the art world in an unconventional fashion. Her early training as a journalist gave her an edge to telling stories and developed a stunning link to the written word – in my experience, this is unusual for a visual artist. Rather than developing her visual language through formal training, pursuing her own practice has become an opportunity to track a familiar path through the written word, pared elegantly with an impressively mature visual language.
Her passion for the arts allowed her to set up many regional projects focusing on furthering and provoking discussion in the arts sector, in addition to being a prolific practising visual artist. Goldsmith often expresses admiration for Rosalie Gascoigne – experiencing success later in life – application of theory through practical means and creating the wealth of knowledge around experience.
Goldsmith’s inherently strong connection with the land came through a childhood spent exploring, on foot and horseback, the family property near Coonamble, NSW. This show is intrinsic to these connections with the land, spanning mixed media, digital media and installation.
The landscapes in the show have “a moody, spiritual depth” – as Goldsmith describes it. Seen through the eyes of a young person, the images are unfettered, relishing of the natural landscape, joyfully documenting the playful rituals of childhood in both rural and beachside settings.
Goldsmith’s previous series, “Grounded” (2011), featured 50cm square images on aluminium and small Polaroid images with captions, evoking an era long past, with a slightly nostalgic feel. The images in this show expand this particular poignancy, entrenched in a subliminal childhood link back to the landscape.
In the scissor paper rock video, the touches of hypercolour, juxtaposition of play, storytelling and movement becomes an adept language for Goldsmith’s memories. This is told with Goldsmith’s daughter, Georgia, and her friends present throughout the action.
For me, Goldsmith’s works bring back memories of having up to ten cubby houses in the grass in the laneway next to our house, the bruises, the scratches, the games. The secret places to keep treasure. The joys of playing in the natural environment, the natural negotiations that happen with games and how we carry this conflict negotiation into adulthood. Alternatively, it’s the solitariness of playing alone and becoming lost in one’s own world of imaginary games.
Goldsmith’s influence for this body of works stems from our “disconnect from the land” as described in Richard Louv’s Nature deficit-disorder – about the growing divide between children and the natural world. Her visual influences are contemporaries Polixeni Papapetrou, who explores identity and performance in her work, and Tamara Dean who explores ephemeral notions of youth. <a sentence to tie these influences to the body of work maybe?
Use of one’s children in art and the subsequent fixation on child safety in artworks remains a controversial topic in Australia – heightened since the police raid on Bill Henson’s exhibition in 2008. The Australia Council released a Working With Children in Art Portocols in 2010. Last year, a recent consultation with National Association of the Visual Arts (NAVA) resulted in removal of the wording ‘artistic defence’ from the Child Pornography section of the NSW Crimes Act. (NAVA recommended a set of protocols if the work of an artist is considered for prosecution).
Aware of the context in which her works are produced, Goldsmith echoes Del Kathryn Barton’s positive take on the use of one’s own children in artwork, revealed in a recent interview with Andrew Taylor (July 2011) after officials in a charity exhibition objected to the inclusion of Barton’s photograph of her young son. “For me,” she explains, ““what is more beautiful than a mother’s gaze upon her own child?”
Goldsmith appreciates the level of comfort her daughter and some of her friends have in front of the camera and in the landscape, and the understanding they have to develop the narrative for a series of works, or an individual work, together. Rather than the children being the focus of the work, Goldsmith outlines how they assist in the recreation of experiences from her own childhood, evoking their own deep connection to the land.
“The images come to me all the time. It’s tapping into memory of landscape – driving past, seeing it in certain light— bringing the memory back.
“I have to be conscious that the children are not the only subject matter. However, making the concept happen is about finding children who are comfortable in the landscape.”
Through the retelling of her own memories, Goldsmith is aiming to recreate a time when the concept of play was “determined by imagination.”
She is strongly committed to the finished product, guiding the camera to “do as much of the work as possible” with fine tuning, layering, adjustment of colour saturation occurring on the computer in a painstaking post-production process The result is a visually stunning body of work with a strong conviction for the conceptual underpinning.
The physicality of the images sit quietly in our memory. The show feels familiar to anyone who has explored the creatures in the grass, squeezed mud between our toes or climbed a tree. The most delightful concept of all is how this series allows us to reflect on our own childhood in the landscape.
© 2011, Merryn Spencer
Perspectives. Art. Ecology., 2009, by Western Plains Cultural Centre curator, Adnan Begic
(Excerpt)
Future.
Passing by…a passenger staring through the window – at what? Colours and lines blur to create landscapes in motion that play back through the mind in flashes of light and dark, at times throwing up blinding pattern. But what are we missing? It’s not even scratching the surface – our ability to see what is really happening is distorted. The denuded landscapes, scarred and barren – overstocked, over- farmed, throwing out a desolate beauty in the process.
Kim Goldsmith, Landscapes in motion – working notes. 2008.
Beside two images from the Landscapes in Motion photographic series, from 2008, a range of new media works was produced through the Perspectives.Art.Ecology. mentorship process – an interactive community journal (blog), video and digital prints, a soundscape and sensory space within the gallery environment.
The installation 2030, (2009) aims to reinforce contemporary debate about global warming in an entirely new way – our senses are provoked in an artificially controlled environment that introduces the elements of heat, humidity, sound, touch and smell; inviting the visitor to experience the sensation of a temperature change.
Little River Dreaming (2009) is a contemplative video and sound work that provides both the visual and listening pleasure of water but also a criticism of water usage. It was recorded in the dry bed of Little River, still waiting on a run of water from further upstream.
Bad Moon Rising (2009) is the looping video and sound which put across threatening notion of climate change. How do we and our communities feel about it and are we afraid of the consequences? Are we overwhelmed, confronted, disempowered?
Bad Moon Rising captures the moon – a natural part of our world that remains unchanged, unlike the elements below it that are undergoing gradual and irreversible change.
The title of Goldsmith’s major project, Coming of Age suggests an idea of the future. It comes from the concept of change occurring in the environment within the next two decades – by 2030.
Coming of Age (2009) is an open platform – an artwork in progress, which gathers community voices and reflects contemporary social and ecological issues of small and remote communities of the Central West of NSW (Trangie and Yeoval). It is an open survey on community issues in dealing with their environment. Set in a gallery context, highly interactive and published instantly in the democratic medium of blogging, the audience is invited to provide the answers on the questions: What is your relationship to the natural environment where you live? What state is the environment in the Central West? How critical is water within your environment? Do you feel you have the ability to change the future of your environment? What is your wish for the environment in 21 years?
Confidently, these questions about the natural environment will reconfirm individual and community senses of place and identity – the place central to our understanding of our role within the world and our ability to control our future.
Engage.
Perspectives.Art.Ecology. is a truly and self-assuredly local and unconditionally global project. The processes and artists involved and the artworks selected make this exhibition a unique experience. Engaging and balanced, these artworks will certainly test the capacity of regional audiences to engage with somewhat different and challenging prospects and artistic proposals; proposals that will hopefully inspire new conversations about our environment.
kvgoldsmithart.com 