Mira Oosterweghel, Soiled feet rammed dirt, 2022, Installation view at Incinerator Gallery. Photo: Lucy Foster.
Mira Oosterweghel, Soiled feet rammed dirt, 2022, Installation view at Incinerator Gallery. Photo: Lucy Foster.
Mira Oosterweghel, Soiled feet rammed dirt, 2022, Installation view at Incinerator Gallery. Photo: Lucy Foster.
Mira Oosterweghel, Soiled feet rammed dirt, 2022, Installation view at Incinerator Gallery. Photo: Lucy Foster.
Mira Oosterweghel, Soiled feet rammed dirt, 2022, Installation view at Incinerator Gallery. Photo: Lucy Foster.
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Soiled feet rammed dirt: Mira Oosterweghel

10 June 2022 - 17 July 2022

Curator:

Artist(s): Mira Oosterweghel

Location: The Atrium

Soiled feet rammed dirt is a text and spatial installation that responds to the history and industrial architecture of Incinerator Gallery. This new project by Mira Oosterweghel is informed as a new iteration of Bone with a hole—an exhibition originally presented at BLINDSIDE Gallery in Melbourneexploring the artist’s childhood memories of spending time on her grandparents’ farm, consuming and reproducing stories of labour and landscape.

 

Soiled feet rammed dirt is a collective enmeshment of these childhood memories, inherently indoctrinated into settler narratives: reciting Banjo Patterson poems in school; nostalgic smells of sheep poo; and leather working in her grandparent’s shearing shed.

 

A stained glass window creates a new facade for the building, obscuring the view outside; a sheer curtain slices the space concealing a speaker. Sounds of mashed up memories echo through the space and a hung leather hide sparkles.

 

Exploring formative memories of consuming and reproducing stories of labour and landscape, Mira employs humour and a queer gaze to reflect on these experiences, whilst considering the relationship between the Essendon Incinerator as a monument designed to conceal the ugliness of industry and the falsity of Australian pastoral narratives.

Join us for the opening of Soilet feet rammed dirt by Mira Oosterweghel, alongside Incinerator's other June exhibitions, Centre for Reworlding Presents: Resurgence curated by Claire G. Coleman and Jen Rae in the Main Gallery and Call me home by Ali Choudhry, Sevim Dogan Ozkan, and Max Iannantuono in Boadle Hall.

Opening event: Friday 10 June, 6 - 8pm, RSVP

Mira Oosterweghel is an artist living and working on the stolen lands of the people of the Kulin Nations. Her recent work is informed by settler narratives and her childhood experiences of farm life and working in a shearing shed on Gunditjmara land. Selected exhibitions include: Objects for ruminant restraint, 2019 at Bus Projects; Figuratively Speaking, 2018 curated by Laura Lantieri at CCP; Fake it til you make it or you’ve got the power, 2017 at TCB Art Inc; Primavera 2016, curated by Emily McCormack at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Screen as a Room, 2016 curated by Nikki Lam at the Substation, Melbourne.

Join artist Mira Oosterweghel for a closing event of Soiled feet rammed dirt, where a performance activates the Atrium installation through movement, sound and spoken word. An accompanying artist talk with Incinerator Gallery curator Jake Treacy will further ruminate themes of the exhibition, exploring nostalgia and scent, labour and landscape, humour and queerness.
This is a free event, with light refreshments served.

RSVP essential.