Seven Forms (Collie '22)
A collaborative printmaking exhibition at Collie Art Gallery, WA, 2022.
​Curated by Dr Janice Baker 

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Sarah Robinson, Graphite Breath 2022. Installation: A graphite dust breath drawing on Hahnemühle 43 x 53cm; 11 etched steel plates; 2 digital images on glass, chalk pen, each 25 x 33cm. ( Image 1: Coal sample from Wallsend Colliery (WA) sent to Paris Exposition 1900, Photograph | 1901. Image 2: 041506PD: Inside Collie Power Station, ca. 1939. Negative on glass, black and white, 8 x 11cm. Digital images were sourced from the collections of the State Library of Western Australia and reproduced with the permission of the Library Board of Western Australia, 2022.

​Sarah Robinson 
Artist Statement  
A geological lens draws on my childhood experiences living on the Mendip Hills in England, keeping warm beside a home coal fire and not realising the implications of the miners' strikes of the 1970s as a teenager. Collie's mining landscape is in a moment of transition. I excavated the town's history, starting in the State Library of Western Australia, to view digitally archived photographs of the Collie Power Station in 1939. These dark images revealed Collie's industrial infrastructure appearing as eerie sites, frozen in time and place. The copies of ghost negatives on glass reminded me of photographs of a sub-arctic Soviet coal mine, Pyramiden, and its abandoned community infrastructure that almost became a post-human environment. 
 
In producing my artwork for Seven Forms (Collie '22), etching steel is a catalyst amid the technological energies discovered through objects that protected a miner's body. Arriving at this point, the artist leans towards a new space shaped by graphite, a critical mineral that holds great potential and brings positive change to Collie's transition as a past becomes the future.

                     Sarah Robinson, Ghost Energies, 2022, Cold rolled steel etched with Lake Deborah Salt (non-toxic etching), digital, Each plate 60 x 60 cm. Photographer Ian Yendell. 

SEVEN FORMS (COLLIE '22) Catalouge