FOUR new exhibitions will open at the Broken Hill City Art Gallery Friday, August 15, including We Were Women Before Our Time, a multimedia installation by Open Cut Commission grant winner Aimee Volkofsky.
Volkofsky has spent months collecting stories from women who spent their youth in Broken Hill to produce the exhibit, which will be both a visual installation as well as a soundscape.
“It’s visual projections and a soundtrack that’s been made after delving into interview with 20 different women who grew up in Broken Hill at different periods of time,” she said.
“It’s a good mix, maybe 50 – 50 on who stayed here and who left. But people who spent their formative years, in adulthood or teenagehood, who were children here in Broken Hill.”
Volkofsky said the exhibition will focus on the impact of place on the women who took part.
“It’s about their recollections in childhood,” she said.
“I wanted to talk to them from that perspective because how kids see and experience a place is really interesting to me. They’re growing and forming opinions and their views of themselves and the world. And their bodies are literally growing. It’s looking at the environment that shapes us.”
Along with the 20 women Volkofsky collaborated with, she also looked into historical records including journals of women living in the region in the very early days of Broken Hill.
“There’s a couple of diaries and accounts of women’s lives from the early days that I looked into in my research,” she said.
“So I was absorbing all this information, I wasn’t quite sure how I’d be using it, but it’s ended up kind of a collaboration with all of these voices.”
She also reflected on her upbringing in the Far West, looking back through journals and letters that she wrote to friends as a teenager.
“It was quite funny and interesting and sobering,” she said.
The outcome of her extensive research will be an exhibit that reflects this kind of “diary” aesthetic, Volkofsky said.
“Because of the source material it’s sort of turned into the aesthetic of a teenage girl’s diary,” she said.
“Layered over photographs that people have shared and landscapes in Broken Hill, kind of trying to create that connection between us as girls and the landscape we’re in and the observations we’re making about where we are growing.”
Also a musician and songwriter, Volkofsky will bring these skills to her show to add another dimension to the exhibition.
“There’ll be a soundscape which is a mixture of environmental sounds from here like birds and the mine blast, and some songs I’ve written kind of inspired by some of these accounts,” she said.
Volkofsky said she felt privileged to be able to share the work and to have been able to connect with and hear the stories of so many women in the making of it.
“I feel really lucky that people were really honest and shared so much with me,” she said.
“And they really invested in seeing it as a whole. I think we’re all looking for some kind of belonging and an explanation of where you’re from, and it’s been interesting to look at that as a line of women in Broken Hill, what we have in common and what is different.”
The exhibition will open next Friday, August 15 at the Broken Hill City Art Gallery.
