Timeless Stories

The global growth of new technologies and communication media has enabled alternative approaches to exploring public history and representations of collective community memory. While urban contexts have enjoyed the presence of these emerging public art practices, in Tasmania, small rural towns have not been exposed to large installations that explore and express collective community memory over variable temporal scales. Such installations have the capacity to generate localised discussion, history sharing and debate as a consequence of audience exposure during everyday activities. The photographic montages created by Evans, Archer and Ehart, explores the tension between sentimental historic depiction of everyday cultural activities juxtaposed against contemporary romantic attachments to iconic representations of sense of place in Wynyard and Waratah. By creating such visual and temporal tension, this work exposes local audiences to new visual narratives of place, therefore opening dialogue about collective community memory in public places.