VISUAL ARTS

Do you read the accompanying room sheet when you look at an art exhibition? Most of the time these contain little other than titles, materials and prices. The room sheet for Lost Rocks at the Rosny Barn is different. It works as an experimental narrative that reveals, at least in part, the process by which some of the works came to be selected. It directly refers to decisions and emotional responses.

This break with convention indicates something important about Lost Rocks: that looking at it in the conventional way might not be the best way to engage.

Lost Rocks, launched in 2017, is an ambitious project that uses publishing as a tool for creating art. It comprises a series of 40 books written by 40 artists, all of which have been given a title derived from a rock display board that was acquired from the Glenorchy Tip Shop. Found by Justy Phillips and Margaret Woodward, who are working together as A Published Event, the rock board once displayed 56 specimens, but 40 have vanished. Inspired by these absences, Phillips and Woodward sought to fill the small voids, not with new specimens, but with books.

Each book in the series is titled after an absent specimen. The books will be published at the rate of eight a year over five years.

This doesn’t reflect geological time, but it is slow, and this is intentional: the as yet unfinished project is supposed to be unhurried and thoughtful.

Lost Rocks is a series of differing manifestations: there are the books, events such as readings, and there’s this exhibition. The artists in this show have written books for the Lost Rocks Project, and the works here entwine with their individual texts.

James Newitt, writer of Fossil, shares a vitrine filled with small sculptures. The casts of fingers and computer hard drives sit scattered among notes and scraps of writing that relate to his own profoundly personal history. It’s a small archaeology of the artist’s life.

Mary Scott’s Petrified Wood work draws the cross-section of a tree on to plywood. It’s an image of wood etched onto wood, but it’s also an image of frozen time. The rings of the tree are how we count its age, but we have to cut it down to see them. There’s some implicit irony here that asks us to consider time and mortality.

Sydney-based artist Therese Keogh, writer of the other Petrified Wood (there are two books with this title), supplies a slow-rolling computer-generated projection that shows a rugged, slowly evolving environment that is almost lunar. The slow movement of the projection has a meditative undercurrent, as if what we’re seeing is some kind of primordial geological event.

All around the space are found objects: wood, rocks, and centrally, Huon pine logs that are clearly labelled as “not dry”. Huon pine has value, but this pine is not quite ready to be an object other than a log.

Like the other works contained in the Barn, the immediate history is still evident. There is no doubt it has a story, but everything here does.

It’s just a matter of how to read it.