Art
Ellen Koshland works in image and text, using photography and typography, screen printing, and glass to further an exploration of what is seen and not seen.
As Far as the Eye can See / Yam Daisy photograph from plants collected Tallarook, Victoria. Spacecraft Studio, 2019
Exhibition / Spacecraft 29 Feb - 13 April 2024
As Far as the Eye Can See, 2019
Certificate of Title, hand screen printed with water based pigments onto Calico, printed with Stewart Russell Spacecraft 2024 75cm x 56cm / edition of 10
As Far as the Eye Can See
Today the native women were spread out over the plain as far as I can see them collecting murnong
So wrote G.A Robinson, Protectorate of Aborigines in 1841. Many other colonists saw women collecting yams – at Indented Hills, Crystal Springs, SA Black Mountain Spur ACT and along the banks of the Yarra or Murray Rivers.
So what did the colonists see? What did they choose not to see? This is the question that prompted this work.
The colonists could not imagine a relation to land other than individual holdings. They could not see that the yams were cultivated, not just collected, using a range of land management techniques refined over thousands of years. Food was a central tool in teaching and knowledge acquisition, part of spiritual connection to country.
Women were buried with digging sticks, yams were part of creation stories. The colonists’ blindness, both misguided and deliberate, was tragic.
The arrival of more than a million hooved animals obliterated the murnong, bringing starvation, and dislocation.
I wished to create an immersive experience of half seeing through a large yellow, screen-printed landscape.
A unique halftone, reconfigured as yams, screens the landscape and expresses the hidden reality.
~ Ellen Koshland
Cultivate, hand screen printed with water based inks onto canvas, printed with Stewart Russell, Spacecraft, 175cm x 125cm, 2020
Cultivate, hand screen printed with water based inks onto canvas, printed with Stewart Russell, Spacecraft, 175cm x 125cm, 2020
Australia Felix, 2025
Australia Felix, 2025; Preface, James Boyce, 1835, The founding of Melbourne & the Conquest of Australia, Black Inc ( 2013 )
Australia Felix, 2025
Cultivate, 25 Rokeby St at Spacecraft Studio, Wardle Architects entry wall, 2019
Cultivate
The use of the term ‘cultivated’ is a challenge to Australia, a nation that built a colony on stolen land, justified by the European assumption of an uncultivated people and land. Their doctrine of terra nullius said that the land was empty, and their labour theory of value said that only those who cultivated the land could own it. That assumption allowed the colonisers to justify the invasion of a sovereign soil, but to take possession of the land, they had to refuse to see the cultivation and care of that was happening in front of their eyes. In spite of all the evidence that they themselves documented, they labelled the people and land ‘uncultivated’ and dispossessed them. What wilful blindness. Hiding from this truth cripples both the brain and the soul.
~ Bruce Pascoe
Rewriting The Politics of Care, published in-ter-sti-tial press 2021, editior Macushla Robinson, p71-p76, Bruce Pascoe / Ellen Koshland
Rewriting The Politics of Care, published in-ter-sti-tial press 2021, editior Macushla Robinson, p71-p76, Bruce Pascoe / Ellen Koshland
Rewriting The Politics of Care, published in-ter-sti-tial press 2021, editior Macushla Robinson, p71-p76, Bruce Pascoe / Ellen Koshland
Rewriting The Politics of Care, published in-ter-sti-tial press 2021, editior Macushla Robinson, p71-p76, Bruce Pascoe / Ellen Koshland
Rewriting The Politics of Care, published in-ter-sti-tial press 2021, editior Macushla Robinson, p71-p76, Bruce Pascoe / Ellen Koshland
Rewriting The Politics of Care, published in-ter-sti-tial press 2021, editior Macushla Robinson, p71-p76, Bruce Pascoe / Ellen Koshland
Un/Seeing Un/Cultivating Un/ Caring
“Koshland is asking us to reconsider the colonial past. It is a good question and good questions often have difficult answers, a reappraisal of our national ethos, our national intelligence, our nationhood. Are we ready to have our knowledge tested? Such change will not be painless but it will be food for our souls and minds.“
~ Bruce Pascoe
Images from a series of Ellen Koshland’s works.
For more information contact the studio at ellenkoshland.projects@gmail.com