Julie Shiel’s project ‘The Overlooked, the Residual and the Discarded’ connects the industrial history of Pipemakers Park and the archival material of the Living Museum of the West in a contemporary, utilitarian context. Performing methodologies of site analysis, Shiel’s work is a direct response, tracing narratives of space and communities of the West.

GB: The overlooked is a theme pertinent to your creative practice. What perspectives of this theme will you develop using the Living Museum of the West’s archival material and/or site?

JS: The project is called ‘The Overlooked, the Residual and the Discarded.’ The fitting set of ideas bind together overlooked elements in Pipemakers Park and the Living Museum of the West, a place of industrial history. The museum has an archive, but the site itself is an archive of land use.

Every public space, every place has its own unique qualities of histories, archaeologies and human usage. I’m investigating what I can draw attention to through gardening, landscaping or sculptural intervention. My intention is light touch so people can use the spaces and start noticing their environment.

GB: What artistic techniques will you employ using the documentary records, surviving structures, and archaeological evidence of Pipemakers Park to construct your project?

JS: A lot of my work is site specific and responsive in public space, an important term based on the idea of space as material understood through typography, history, archaeology, politics, form, light or shape. When content and context come together, a singing occurs, the space informing me what artwork to make.

GB: Is there an interplay or exchange between the works you will create in Pipemakers Park?

JS: It’s an accumulating methodology, with an interplay of light touch and recuperation, reviving the space for contemporary usage. At the Pipemakers Picnic Ground, the pipe makers would go fishing on Friday afternoons. They planted fruit trees, made a set of picnic tables and stools, a BBQ out of pipes and a herb garden in pipe columns resembling doric architecture.

During the process of replanting the empty columns of the herb garden, I discovered relics and residues of oyster shells, half burnt coal and plastic. The moss and difference of shape has become more obvious, changing its value. I will replace the fallen round seats of the picnic table to clear resin, with the intention of a ghostly effect, and interplay between clear resin and concrete.

GB: What brought you to undertake an artist residency at the Living Museum of the West?

JS: There is a real honesty to this space. There aren’t many places left in Melbourne that haven't been gentrified and this is one of them. I have known about the Museum since it started, it’s an open organisation and it fits the work that I want to do at the moment. I regularly reject the white cube; the work only has a relationship with itself, unlike the context of interventions in public space.

GB: How does the Living Museum of the West connect to your interest in finding human traces and evidence of social life?

JS: I’m interested in absences, traces, the idea of an index. I’ve been doing site analysis, (exploration or research) by weeding and gardening, focusing on small areas in a concentrated way. It’s a productive method and you notice the industrial residue.

GB: In what ways does the Living Museum’s of the West foundation as an eco museum inform your project development?

JS: The idea of the eco museum is a living and evolving thing. My methodology for this project aligns with this ideology, allowing the space to inform the work. It fits with new materialism, and the philosophy of engagement between people. I have done conceptual aesthetics and intellectual pursuits, but now in our current urgent and frightening times, I feel I need to do something more concrete and practical that is useful to broader audiences using the space communally.

GB: What is the significance of working site specifically to your practice?

JS: The site is my muse; there is never a blank canvas. Walter Benjamin discusses investigating and writing about different cities, visiting the same location from different positions, points of view and day. Subjectivity plays into it, and something new can emerge.

As an individual and as an artist, when you discover something, you have brought into view a catalyst for sharing observation and a way of thinking. An artwork doesn’t necessarily need to be made, it’s a way of seeking, finding and observing.