MITCHEL CUMMING & KENZEE PATTERSON
’A REDISTRIBUTION’
16 FEBRUARY–31 MARCH, 2023
ARTIST STATEMENT
A redistribution is an iterative exhibition project by Mitchel Cumming and Kenzee Patterson, featuring individual and collaborative object and text-based works that centre around a pair of historical basalt millstones. The stones, once used in convict and landowner Thomas West’s watermill in the inner Sydney suburb of Paddington, now sit within the collection of the Powerhouse Museum.
This project gathers the varied ethical, material and political strands associated with an idea of redistribution, embodied within these two colonial-era basalt millstones. Resisting dominant Western narratives of settlement, growth, industry, and the developmental, the artists instead follow the poetic, speculative threads that the stone itself suggests.
The first iteration of this exhibition was shown at Metro Arts, Meanjin/Brisbane in October 2022.
Audio Descriptions
Audio descriptions for the blind and low-vision community have been developed for selected works, in collaboration with Sarah Empey and Sarah Barron. These can be accessed via QR codes located within the gallery space, and at the links below.
#3 Redistribution (forbearing / forthcoming)
This project is supported by the Powerhouse Museum for the loan of the millstones.
Kenzee Patterson is represented by Darren Knight Gallery.
Excerpt from Yielding: a conversation between Caitlin Franzmann, Kenzee Patterson, and Mitchel Cumming
[link to pdf of full exhibition text can be found below]
‘CF: …I can’t help but wonder what drives you to keep asking questions about this material [basalt/millstones] and invite others in on the process. I know that there are so many tendrils of inquiry within the project, but what would you say underpins your research?
KP: I want to begin answering your question by quoting two lines from the 1971 poem Truth by the Papua New Guinean poet and scholar Apisai Enos: “Those rocks are not dumb/they have life like we.” I included this quote for several reasons. Firstly, because it highlights the fact that these millstones are rock, something that is easy to overlook despite the word ‘stone’ appearing in their name, and due to their careful shaping by chisel. They could be mistaken for cast concrete, and sometimes the artwork that I have made from basalt is similarly misread. This has something to do with the blue-grey colour of the stone, but it also relates to the bubbles that are frozen in the surface of the material. This vesiculation, as it is known, would have once been pockets of gas that were trapped as the molten lava solidified.
Another reason for including the lines from Enos’s poem is because these millstones have life, just as we do, albeit life that we cannot fully know. Basalt is a material that wears a clue to its fluid beginnings, and perceiving these two stones also means considering the larger flow of material from which they were originally quarried. Once aware of this, we can then be led to thinking about the molten pools of liquid magma circulating beneath us in the Earth’s asthenosphere, the source of this lava. There are scales of temporality and geography/ geology at play within this material that defy easy comprehension, and these millstones have a life history that sits within a geological time frame. They also have a liveliness that occurs at a molecular level, unfolding in the complex relationships with the environments and more-than-human world they have been in proximity to, existing beyond the sensory perception of humans.’
(Yielding… continued)
'KP: I want to emphasise this last point, because while Mitch and I have been getting to know these millstones over the past two years, we recognise that we will not comprehend them absolutely. Ours is an artistic inquiry, following the leads suggested by the stone itself with no endpoint in mind, and we accept that the findings may be inconclusive. We are motivated by speculation into the cycles of material and bodily displacement represented by the millstones and the basalt they are carved from. This is a movement of the human and more-than-human across bodies of water including the Great Ocean, which is tied to both violent colonial expansion and intricate networks of voyaging and exchange.
In our interaction with these stones, we have adopted modes of inquiry native to other disciplines like history and archaeology. We have participated in truly interdisciplinary collaboration with geologists and archaeologists, generating new knowledge about the provenance of the millstones. Sometimes artist-led research like this has real world implications in terms of our understanding of histories and objects. These details are important because they can help to reframe accepted narratives, and this is work that is especially important in the context of Australia’s violent history of invasion and ongoing colonisation. To refer once more to Enos’s poem, these rocks aren’t dumb; they speak some of their story if we know how to listen.
MC: We encountered these stones in a museological context which frames them not as the active, agentic matter that Kenzee describes, but as relics of a sort. Their use-value as millstones having been exhausted, they came to rest in the collection as static checkpoints in a historical narrative of linear, industrial progress. This speaks very clearly to the way the Earth has been perceived within a dominant Western ontology: valued for its productive potential in service of the human, as a resource to be ab-used (literally used up) before being cast back into the category of the inert. And so our initial engagement with the stones was driven by a desire to reanimate them or, rather, to point out that they remain active in and of themselves…’
Exhibition Text: a conversation between Caitlin Franzmann, Kenzee Patterson and Mitchel Cumming