6 JULY - 30 JULY 2022
FRONT GALLERY

BERNADETTE KLAVINS
Vast Spoils

Inspired by aerial imagery of Australian open cut mines observed on Google Earth, Vast Spoils reflects on these sites as scars or wounds upon a bodily landscape that are felt across deep time. In 2017, The Australia Institute stated that tens of thousands of mine site have suspended operations, closed or been abandoned across the country, from single mine shafts to unrehabilitated mines or quarries.

Incorporating materials drawn from underground spaces – sand, metal, oil, oxide, graphite and plaster – Vast Spoils sculpturally responds to the physical forces of mining; excavation and extraction, burying and exposing, corrupting and restoring.

Here, each cast holds a trace of a past interaction between human and non-humans – the sawn surface of a root, or the marks left upon dug earth. Vast Spoils looks to draw these human-scale actions into relation with industrial practices, and quietly calls attention to the complicated geological force of humans in the age of the Anthropocene.

ARTIST BIO

Based in Tartanya (Adelaide), Bernadette Klavins is an artist working in the field of sculpture. Through processes of casting, Klavins draws out the poetic potential of materials and considers our human relationship to deep time and geologic forces. In 2016, Klavins graduated from Adelaide Central School of Art (ACSA) and received a Major Travel Award, before completing a residency at The Icelandic Association of Visual Art in Reykjavik. Klavins has since exhibited at spaces including Watch This Space (NT), Canberra Contemporary Art Space (ACT), Cool Change Contemporary (WA), FELTspace (SA), Floating Goose Studios (SA) and Adelaide Central Gallery (SA). Klavins makes from Switchboard Studios in Norwood, alongside lecturing at ACSA and working in the Public Programs team at the Art Gallery of South Australia.