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Almost everyone brings back rocks, shells and driftwood from the beach. Also seaweed: these things hang around the house to prompt our memories, to help things "come to mind ... ". This unselfconscious activity, with hints at metaphysical enquiry, was amplified in two installations by Heather Winter at Gertrude Street-She Collects it and more recently The Sand Fire Story.
She Collects it was distributed over three gallery spaces: a slide at the door to 200 Gertrude Street end a plexiglass column containing kelp in water in the window space/gallery were introductions to the main installation in Studio 12. In this, Winter had hung a circle of kelp from the ceiling. The south window of the room was covered in photographic negatives of text from early Scottish and Australian sea songs. Hung edge to edge, these formed a net of songs from the old country. A projector shone light through this throwing the words into the room next door and reflecting them back, reversed, into Studio 12. Although the ring of kelp was lit from the inside, most of the light in the room came from the projector, from the examination of the songs taking place in darkness, shadows and reflected light.
The other part of the installation was a white A4 page carrying the artist's statement. In this, Winter put forward a quotation from Don Watson's book Caledonia Australis, pointing out that English-owned sheep displaced Scottish Highlanders who were forced to the coast to collect kelp. Watson's epigraph, "Of what they had before the late conquest of their country, there remains only their language and their poverty", seemed to clarify the artist's work. She had, in shaman-like simulation, collected kelp