ROB KETTELS

Time Machine (2023) explores the entanglement of various material and cultural histories that intersect geology, extractivism, culture and time. The sculpture is made from electromechanical components which hold 80 cropped Geological Survey maps of Western Australia. The maps rotate around a mechanical spindle to produce a non-linear animation. To power the rotation, a stainless-steel assembly was built to house a 12v motor, gears and timing belt. The outer assembly gives the work an austere machinery appearance. Many of the geological maps used in Time Machine were produced in the 1970–80s and have the appearance of abstract art. The motion of the maps around the spindle produces an optical illusion creating beautiful colour blends.

The maps also denote Earth processes and mineral compositions that have taken hundreds of millions of years to form—now converging with the present. Yet Time Machine does not represent a simplistic narrative of human versus nature, but rather the processes through which raw materials, no matter how isolated, are extracted from their surroundings and then commodified. This is achieved via the allegory of the spinning geological maps (that depict remote mining regions of Western Australia).

On one hand the maps are a testament to the rich scientific knowledge in the field of geology. On the other hand, the maps can be read in a way that codifies the upper portion of the Earth’s crust as a potential mineral resource. However, the concept of ‘resource’ is socially constructed— raising the philosophical and ethical question of how knowledge is produced and who benefits from its production. In the case of geoscience, it is multinational mining corporations who benefit, but because of that, I benefit (through paradigms of complicity and everyday life). By making an artwork from the result of mineral extraction, I aim to illustrate the complex and dynamic exchange between the geological, time and culture.

Rob Kettels is an artist and PhD candidate based in Perth, Australia. His art practice aims to problematise how the geologic is imagined and represented in contemporary Western culture. Broadly, his multidisciplinary art practice focuses on geoaesthetics and human-earth relations. Alongside these critical investigations, Rob draws from his lived experience as a long-distance desert trekker into arid biomes of Western Australia. His methodology usually involves site-specific field trips into remote and arid geographies, whereby he documents embodied participation with the site or represents it as installation art. Over the preceding three years he has made sculpture, assemblage, audio-video, photography, installation, painting and undertaken endurance performance in order to express his experience of the geological. In 2017, Kettels received a Bachelor Degree in fine art (First Class Honours) from Curtin University, and in 2018, received a Curtin University postgraduate research scholarship which he is currently undertaking.

Rob Kettels

Time Machine (detail)

2023