Rockpools
Rockpools dwells with the stories of three generations of West's grandmothers – Wuggi, Sheila and Shirley – and the entanglement of their lives and legacies with colonial expansion in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Supported by a 2024 National Regional Arts Fellowship, West travelled to places of significance to her family. The town of Onslow, its neglected cemetery, Millstream Station, and Murujuga, a place of high cultural importance that is home to the oldest rock art and bacterial life forms on the planet.
Rockpools comprises the detritus of colonisation – metal objects scavenged from the tip shops in Karratha on Ngarluma Ngurra (Country) and closer to West's home in Noongar Ballardong Boodja (Country). These objects carry the story of mining and resource extraction from Ngurra, particularly that of iron ore, and the resulting destruction of land and water flows. Arranged as rockpools, they reflect those of the coast revealed at low tide, those inland reserved for women to welcome their babies, and aquifers below ground fed by millennia of rainfall. The rockpools in the gallery, frequented by radios and bailer shells (Melo amphora), transmit a composition that includes hydrophone recordings collected at Onslow and Point Samson, as well as the resonant frequencies of bailer shells – vessels used by ancestors to carry and drink water, or more recently, to mark the graves of loved ones.
Rockpools holds multiple shifting stories, times, and places. At this moment, government support for expanding natural gas extraction, as well as the current construction of a fertiliser plant on the Burrup Peninsula, undermines the long campaign for Murujuga to gain UNESCO World Heritage status. These industries have damaged and continue to disturb Murujuga's living cultural landscape, which contains an estimated 2 million petroglyphs and evidence of 50,000 years of continuous cultural knowledge. This exhibition honours Yaburara, Ngarluma, Mardudhunera, Yindjibarndi, and Wong-Goo-Tt-Oo Elders and Custodians who protect and maintain the Lore and Ngurra, for all time.