Gathering these things to remind me of home

In BRAG's Vault space in December Melbourne artist Penelope Aitken will present an ethereal rock garden made of wire, light and air. The project alludes to the intersections of nature and culture found in art and landscape design, craft and cultivation.

Beginning with a curiosity about the fashion for naturalistic 'native' rock gardens constructed in the Australian suburbs in the 1970s, the project has expanded to include an interest in rocks that have been moved by natural forces as well as by the hard manual labour of convicts and indentured workers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

"Imagining all of these moved rocks as immigrants or travellers I add patterns to their surfaces that suggest culture and traditions carried from other times and places. In the place of lichen and moss, these rocks wear homely handicrafts."

Under low lighting these objects are isolated in space, further disconnecting the rocks from their imagined sources. And lacking the solidity of stone, Aitken's rocks also suggest the impermanence of civilization if viewed over a geological timeframe.