THRESH / HOLD: The Pavilion Artists Residency
By Hans Van Hans
THRESH / HOLD, produced by Kylie Harries, brings The Pavilion Artists — Harries, Amanda Gardner, Mel Brady and Shan Michaels — to respond to the site of the Dayboro Showgrounds Pavilion. Its title connects two ideas: thresh, to separate and process, and threshold, a point of transition. Throughout the residency, these themes became visible as each artist used the site to test, refine and develop new directions worth carrying forward.
Harries brings historical research into contact with the repeated actions and familiar objects of rural life. The loss of Show Society records in the 2011 floods gives womenswork particular weight: the repetitive production and removal of documents turns administration into a physical act, asking what remains as evidence when an archive disappears. In Girls performing and All Gather Here, working objects and materials keep their practical associations while also carrying histories of labour and adaptation. Together, Harries’ works suggest that rural history survives not only in records but in the objects, routines and practical knowledge that continue to shape everyday life.
Gardner extends drawing beyond the wall and into the room. In Inhabiting space, suspended double-sided drawings and photographs are encountered in motion, making the viewer’s body part of how the work is read. Dress forms develops this further by cutting and assembling rejected drawings into bodily forms, showing how some of the residency’s clearest possibilities emerged from remnants that might otherwise have been discarded. Gardner’s uncertainty around individual images and marks appeared productive: her work points toward a practice in which drawing is shaped as much by how it occupies space as by what appears on the page.
Brady uses the pavilion itself as part of the installation. Gathered fabrics, reflective surfaces, movement, light and barn-dance music work with the building’s architecture to recall the temporary transformation of community halls for celebration. This also creates an interesting cycle: Brady draws on the traces and memories of past gatherings, while the glitter, confetti and other remnants of her own installation may themselves become part of the pavilion’s material history. Her installation contains several distinct ideas, and giving the projection, reflective assemblages, and moving textiles more room as individual pieces within a larger body of work could allow their associations with celebration, memory, and loss to register more clearly.
Michaels also makes memory physically active rather than treating it only as a subject. In A house is a creek is a dream, the suspended textiles draw the pavilion’s rafters into the work, allowing the architecture of one place to overlap with memories of another. The BMX element extends that relationship with movement and sound, turning recollection into a physical way of navigating the space. Riding between the other installations, I found myself approaching the surrounding works with a child's curiosity and excitement. Michaels’ reach beyond their designated area suggests the potential for a larger environment in which textiles, projections and sound could be encountered with that same exploratory movement.
Across THRESH / HOLD, the artists’ different perspectives influenced one another, while women’s labour became more prominent in their research, materials and use of the pavilion. The showcase clarified the threshing process: ideas were tested, separated, reworked and carried forward in different ways. Its significance lies in how making alongside others, revisiting memory and encountering the same place from different positions sharpened what each artist could carry forward.
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