Restorying Coal

Coal is today seen as a climate change villain but not long ago it was a hero in stories about national development and workers’ struggle. 

Although energy transition promises clean, green visions of modernity, what is it like for communities raised on coal and how does coal’s reframing affect collective memories?

Join a conversation with leading visual artists and ceramicists to discuss how we can take fossil fuel histories seriously, and the role artists and historians have to play in this.

Associate Professor Nancy Cushing will discuss her historical research on the Jubilee Coal monument in Newcastle and why the grief of coal mining communities should be acknowledged and memorialised. 

Ceramic artist Luke Ryan O’Connor will show his work reinterpreting the Jubilee Coal monument and his experiments with fly ash from Eraring power station.

Visual artist Merilyn Fairskye will present the process behind her Powerhouse Photography commission to document the transformation of Liddell Power Station to a planned clean energy renewables hub.

Date: Saturday 2 November 2024

Time: 11:00am - 12:30pm

Venue: Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning.

Speakers: Nancy Cushing, Merilyn Fairskye, Luke O’Connor Ryan.

Speaker Bios:
Nancy Cushing researches and writes about Newcastle, crime and human-animal histories. She is Associate Professor of History at the University of Newcastle, Australia on beautiful Awabakal and Worimi country. An environmental historian whose interests range from coal mining to human-other animal relations, she was co-editor of Animals Count: How Population Size Matters in Animal-Human Relations (Routledge 2018) and recently took a slight diversion by writing a book on the history of crime in Australia (A History of Crime in Australia, Australian Underworlds, Routledge 2023). Her current project is A New History of Australia in 15 Animals (Bloomsbury). Nancy is on the executives of the Australian Aotearoa NZ Environmental History Network and the Australian Historical Association and a member of the NSW Working Party for the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Nancy can be found on Facebook as @HistoryatNewcastle.

Merilyn Fairskye is a visual artist based in Sydney whose recent video and photographic work explores the effects of powerful events on humans and the environment. Her current projects examining the relationships between technology, atomic landscapes and community have taken her on location to The Polygon in Kazakhstan, Sellafield (England), Chernobyl and other key nuclear sites. These trips have led to the creation of an art film, video installations and a photographic series exhibited in Australia and internationally. Fairskye’s work has been presented in more than 180 exhibitions. Her feature-length art film, Precarious, was nominated for the 2012 Al Jazeera Documentary Channel long-form film award.

Luke Ryan O’Connor, is a Sydney based ceramic artist. An artist in residence at Kil.n.it Experimental Ceramic Studios (known for their explorative, avant-garde attitude to the production of fine art ceramics), O’Connor is fast establishing a reputation for himself as an artist whose practice involves utilising the traditional utilitarian language of ceramics and reconfiguring it in imaginative and alternative ways.

Image credit: Detail from Yesterday New Future (Liddell). Three-channel video installation with sound. Merilyn Fairskye.  

(Commissioned by the Powerhouse Museum using funds generously donated by the Australian Centre for Photography, 2023)