Dr Penny Dunstan is a Newcastle-based artist, writer, and agronomist/soil scientist with a keen interest in multiple views of land management. Her PhD research examined land rehabilitation at Rix’s Creek mine site through the multiple lenses of soil science, land reconstruction, social licence to operate, and art. Her art practice invites the land to represent itself through multidisciplinary techniques: making gallery-based work with Hunter Valley topsoils and anthroposols; long exposure, limited inference, analogue photography in situ; and a writing practice that acknowledges the old ways on Wonnaura Country. Currently she is working with 3D printing earth bowls to explore ideas of cultural and deep time.
‘’We recognise that the transition of the Liddell site is a significant moment in the lives of many in the region, and we value the opportunity to use art and creative practice to facilitate both reflection on what has past, but also, on what the future of Liddell might hold. We want to take this opportunity to support the community in remembering and reflecting on Liddell’s recent history, and how this sits within a much longer history of the site itself (evident in its geology/history in deep time). We also want to use this residency to invite a diverse range of community members to participate in thinking about (and imagining) what else might lie in store for Liddell now that the power station is being decommissioned. We’d like to use the opportunity of the residency to support community members in taking time to look and listen to the place of Liddell itself, and to think about, and express, ideas about what this important place might yet mean to the community, and how this might also be shaped by echoes of Liddell.”