Glenn Barkley: Aqua Obscurities

By Brooke Boland

At the centre of Glenn Barkley’s Plant Your Feet exhibition at Shoalhaven Regional Gallery sits a house invitingly called The Wonder Room. Clad with over 800 clay tiles, it’s the work of many hands, children and adults from the Shoalhaven, who have made one tile each. If you look closely, you’ll find a dinosaur somewhere. I know this because it’s what my four-year-old chose to draw under the guidance of artists Cita Daidone and Penny Craig when we stumbled on the project at our local shopping centre. My son sat down in serious and joyful concentration and drew something he loved. What you won’t see when you look at the house is how he hasn’t stopped making things out of clay ever since. How many others—children and adults— went home and made something for themselves? As an example of engaging locals in artmaking, this would be its own measure of success.

When I meet Barkley at his studio just north of Berry, stacks of these tiles are waiting to be fired. ‘There’s still so much to do,’ he says. He continues to glaze small clay shells in aqua blue as we talk. He points out a new work waiting nearby on a crowded shelf; a small puckered vase with a striking blue-black panther. If you’re a local, you know the story of this panther, which has been reported a few times over the years. In the Panther Archives invented by the artist, Barkley attributes an account to Macca

Wardle: ‘It was late, I’ll be honest I’d had a few beers but thought, oh yeah, I’ll just cross that old bridge and get to the pub for a couple of sneaky ones before heading back to the van—that’s when I saw something just in the bushes near the museum with what looked like a fox hanging from its mouth—it was so big the fox looked like a rat! It looked up and for a moment we locked eyes—that panther, I know what it was no matter what Steve said later. I swear it winked and then whooshka-goneski…. Fuck Steve anyway, everyone knows he's the one full of shit’(sic).

Barkley delights in local mythologies, which are reflected throughout Plant Your Feet. ‘It’s about creating new objects and thinking about obscure histories and things that maybe only locals might know about,’ he says.

The exhibition includes new work by Barkley as well as paintings and objects from local museums and regional gallery collections that feature the Shoalhaven landscape. Importantly, the exhibition includes work by First Nations artists from the region, including Ben Brown, Peter Hewitt, and Julie Freeman, among others, as well as shell work by Esme Timbery. Together with Barkley’s large and small ceramics, these works create a dialogue that acknowledges First Nations sovereignty as the foundation of place in this exhibition—where we literally have planted our feet, in many cases. A large roundle by Barkley spells out a line borrowed from poet Judith Wright to drive this point home: ‘I was born into a coloured country’.

Barkley’s inclusion of Wright’s poetry is reflected through the lens of Australian historiography, itself inspired by historian Anna Clark’s new book Making Australian History, which questions how history is written and who gets to write our past. Plant Your Feet stages Barkley’s own consideration of who is represented in local accounts and what stories are kept through practices of curation and collection. ‘What do we choose to keep? Why do we keep it? What do we choose not to keep? What do we choose to forget? What are the actual interesting stories about the region that you can't see?’ These are the questions that really interest him. ‘Like draining swamps,’ he adds. ‘Draining swamps is a key part of history in the Shoalhaven and no one ever talks about it because it's so unsexy,’ he laughs.

Barkley himself grew up in Sussex Inlet and so knows much of the local lore and landmarks, but the project has taken his understanding to another level. ‘I grew up here, but I never really thought about the history of the place very much. It's funny how you can live here for so long and not really think about those things. Especially in a place like the Shoalhaven where First Nations culture is so important. This [region] is a first contact site as well, which I don't think people really acknowledge’. He spent time revisiting the objects held at local museums such as Berry Museum and Tabourie Lake Museum, some of which he first visited as a child.

Outside of the dry history books of the region there’s more to be found in oral histories, artworks, and literature by people from the Shoalhaven, such as the late Frank Moorhouse who grew up in Nowra. ‘It's not rewriting history; it's just thinking about the past and how what has been written could be wrong,’ Barkley says. After all, everyone knows Steve is full of shit.

GLENN BARKLEY, PLANT YOUR FEET, 10 DEC – 28 JAN 2023, SHOALHAVEN REGIONAL GALLERY

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