Rachel Rovira

My artistic practice seeks to reanimate arrested histories and draw attention to sites of abandonment. Working across performance, writing, installation, and photography, my approach to art making uses ambiguity as a productive creative force that promotes thinking around the ‘possibility of possibility’.

Using field work as my primary form of research, my most recent works engage with the history of extractive practices in and around Melbourne - tracing the trajectories of these violent legacies which today reside in corroded, hollowed out landscapes throughout Victoria.

Photographs taken during site visits to these ‘shadow places’ form an archive of destruction and transience that bear witness to the legacies of mining as they continuously morph into multiple forms. Documenting these shadow places, my works explore how mining legacies contribute to an ‘unruly heritage’ - the unacknowledged but nevertheless present detritus of our society.

Emphasising photography’s capacity to distort and frame your view, my works point to the inherent violence at work in how images extract meaning from the world. Mining detritus and photographic prints are examined and recontextualised through material and spatial investigations, with the intention of transforming the gallery space into a site of speculation where ideas and meanings are given new congruences.