My installation features a dome tent pitched in an unlikely place. On top of Site 16, the tent recalls the makeshift camps which amassed in 1852 when gold was discovered at Spring Creek, Beechworth. The inaccessible location of this tent evokes the unreachable heights of hope and ambition that drove small-scale miners and prospectors, many of whom ended in bankruptcy, crippling debt, and destitution. The building the tent stands on is the former Oriental Bank that turned extracted gold into capital before its bankruptcy in the wake of the 1884 world financial collapse. 

Inside the tent a video was projected onto the walls and visible at night. Played on a loop it begins with a moon of rock which fades to the round sunglasses of my grandmother , Marjorie who sits on a rock exposed by the tide. Seen through the viewfinder of a microscope it then folds into vibrant faceted colours of other minerals recorded with a geological petrographic microscope . This follows documentation of glistening mineral sands falling like gold dust . Lastly, the video pans out to a portrait of myself as a geologist’s daughter, inspecting rock samples drawn from a sample bag in my father’s archives. From the video the moon becomes a wooden three-quarter moon ,suspended on a stick outside the tent. Not quite full and not quite new this point of the moon cycle some consider an auspicious time for reflection and forgiveness. This was the moon phase for this year’s Beechworth Biennale. 

Reflection on the sight of a double moon is a cosmologically expansive concept to me, collapsing personal and inherited histories, with geological time . I want to construct new ways of experiencing the world where human and more-than-human agencies are co-present and co-constitutive, circling and swirling between the vastness of time, location and matter. 

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