Created during Valender’s artistic residency at The University of Melbourne’s Dookie campus for the Centre of Visual Arts’ Art + Ecology program, Field features a multi-channel video installation made up of four moving image works: Re-search, Bovine Harp, Artist as Animal and Sediment.
Set amongst the fluorescent canola fields and dairy farms of Dookie, each film combines sculpture, performance and video to explore various aspects of agricultural life and the relationship between art and the natural world.
Across the four films, the viewer is taken on an unexpected journey; in Artist as Animal, we see Valender force her way through a hardy canola crop; in Bovine Harp, she teaches a calf to use its tongue to strum the strings of a harp.
The films reframe the recognisable landscape of Dookie, allowing the familiar views for locals to be seen through an outsider’s perspective.
SAM curator Caroline Esbenshade said through her performances, Valender highlighted the labour and resilience required by farmers to succeed.
“The work is a celebration of the region, an invitation to see the fields and paddocks around us as cinematic landscapes and a nod to the ties between the metropolitan and suburban to the rural,” she said.
Valender said her work was often shaped by her location.
“I allow the research and conversations that I have with local residents to inform and drive the artworks that I make,” she said.
“While making the works for Field, I was instantly drawn to the rhythm and mechanics of the college’s robotic milking shed and laboratories.
“The seemingly endless fields of golden canola, with brilliant blue cloudless skies overhead, also made the surrounding landscapes ready-made artworks in themselves.
“I hope that the whimsy-meets-endurance nature of the exhibition, combined with the rolling hills of Dookie, brings people some delight in seeing the familiar made anew.”
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