Of middens and dumps

This painting was exhibited in 'Unnatural History: The Tower Hill Project', a sell-out touring exhibition to Warrnambool Art Gallery and Lismore Regional Gallery. The exhibition commemorated over 160 years since Australian artist Eugene von Guérard painted Tower Hill VIC (1855). In the exhibition Hobie Porter interrogated the environmental impacts that colonial settlement has had on this special place. Guided by von Guérard’s painting, a major revegetation program began in the 1960s to restore the flora and fauna native to the region. Porter’s depiction of Tower Hill celebrated this renewed state, while also alluding to the complexities of the restoration program.

Porter’s sublime panoramic landscapes are overlaid with configurations of the minutiae that the artist discovered while exploring these sites. Feathers, leaves, flowers, botanical specimens, ceramic shards and beach shells (often used to represent Aboriginal midden shells) – forge meaningful connections between the microcosm and the macrocosm.

This exhibition was developed by Warrnambool Art Gallery in conjunction with the artist.

The artwork is framed in a dark stained timber.

Hobie Porter artist statement: It’s a painting about the similarities between two cultures. Middens can be viewed along the shores just south of tower hill- the local First Nation people ate their shellfish and discarded the shells all along there. I found and collected a dump of broken colonial shards of ceramic on tower hill itself and saw the similarity- a kind of colonial midden. So it’s a combination (or collision) of both shells and colonial ceramics, sharing the beauty of the same landscape.