— Verge Gallery

MITCHEL CUMMING & KENZEE PATTERSON
”A REDISTRIBUTION”
16 FEBRUARY–31 MARCH

Mitchel Cumming and Kenzee Patterson, *Redistribution (forbearing / forthcoming),* 2021. The weight of a basalt millstone held in the storage of the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney pressing a magnesium deboss die into twenty sheets of handmade paper for the duration of the exhibition 1⁄2 to dust, held at Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney from March 6 – April 1, 2021, 16 blind debossed prints in repurposed frames, 670 × 900mm (each). Photography by Mitchel Cumming.
Image Description: pictured is a detail of one work in a series of sixteen framed prints on paper. The paper is cream coloured. Debossed into the paper are two words in capital letters: ‘DEEP HEAT,’ the word ‘DEEP’ sitting above and the word ‘HEAT’ sitting directly below. Both words follow a slight curve upwards from left to right, mimicking the logo of a popular pain relief ointment.

ARTIST STATEMENT

A redistribution is an iterative exhibition project by Mitchel Cumming and Kenzee Patterson, featuring individual and collaborative object and text-based works that centre around a pair of historical basalt millstones. The stones, once used in convict and landowner Thomas West’s watermill in the inner Sydney suburb of Paddington, now sit within the collection of the Powerhouse Museum.

This project gathers the varied ethical, material and political strands associated with an idea of redistribution, embodied within these two colonial-era basalt millstones. Resisting dominant Western narratives of settlement, growth, industry, and the developmental, the artists instead follow the poetic, speculative threads that the stone itself suggests.

The first iteration of this exhibition was shown at Metro Arts, Meanjin/Brisbane in October 2022.

Mitchell Cumming and Kenzee Patterson, *A redistribution*, 2023, installation view, dimensions variable. Photography by Jessica Maurer.
Image Description: A wide shot of the gallery space. Towards the middle of the space, there sits a millstone, positioned on a square-shaped grey metal pallet. The millstone is of a short cylindrical shape and is dark grey in colour, mimicking the shade of the concrete gallery floor. There appears to be a sort of hole within the centre of the millstone however, due to the position of the camera, somewhat distanced from the millstone, the details of this hole cannot be determined. To the right of this millstone sits another millstone on a pallet, almost identical to the aforementioned millstone. The millstones are positioned approximately three metres apart. Behind the millstones is a white wall which extends across the majority of the back of the gallery. Towards the left of the wall, two pieces of wood, practically identical in length and chocolate-brown colour, are attached to the wall in a vertical position, parallel to each other. Towards the right of the wall there hangs sixteen framed deboss prints, arranged in two rows of eight. The prints are cream in nature, mounted on a white mount board and framed in a light-coloured timber.

Audio Descriptions
Audio descriptions for the blind and low-vision community have been developed for selected works, in collaboration with Sarah Empey and Sarah Barron. These can be accessed via QR codes located within the gallery space, and at the links below.

#1 Introduction

#2 Millstones

#3 Redistribution (forbearing / forthcoming)

#4 Deep Heat

#5 Double Zero

This project is supported by the Powerhouse Museum for the loan of the millstones.

Kenzee Patterson is represented by Darren Knight Gallery.

Mitchel Cumming, *Spelt Flour*, 2023, acrylic on and off gallery wall, dimensions variable. Photography by Jessica Maurer.
Image Description: This wide image captures a light-coloured timber vitrine positioned against a white wall with the text ‘bafaltes’ positioned on it, just above the mid-height of the wall, the length of the word aligning with the length of the vitrine. The word ‘bafaltes’ is a light grey colour however does not appear bold, in fact appearing slightly faint, an effect achieved through Cumming’s sanding back of the painted word.

Mitchel Cumming, *Spelt Flour* (detail), 2023, acrylic on and off gallery wall, dimensions variable. Photography by Jessica Maurer.
Image Description: This image captures the second half of the word ‘bafaltes’ on a white wall. Only the letters ‘a,’ ‘l,’ ‘t,’ ‘e,’ and ‘s’ are visible. The letters appear to be a light grey in colour however the grey is not a bold, resolved grey - areas of white are visible within the ‘grey’ letters, creating a sort of speckled or mottled effect, achieved through the artist’s sanding back of the painted word. Below the text on the wall sits the mid-section of a vitrine. The vitrine has not been captured in full. The edges of the vitrine consist of a light-coloured timber, with the upper surface of the vitrine consisting of clear glass. Through the glass, the word ‘flouuer’ is visible in grey upon the white base of the vitrine. On first glance, the word seems to be painted to the vitrine’s base however, upon closer inspection, it can be seen that the word is made up of a fine dust-like substance.

Excerpt from Yielding: a conversation between Caitlin Franzmann, Kenzee Patterson, and Mitchel Cumming
[link to pdf of full exhibition text can be found below]

‘CF: …I can’t help but wonder what drives you to keep asking questions about this material [basalt/millstones] and invite others in on the process. I know that there are so many tendrils of inquiry within the project, but what would you say underpins your research?

KP: I want to begin answering your question by quoting two lines from the 1971 poem Truth by the Papua New Guinean poet and scholar Apisai Enos: “Those rocks are not dumb/they have life like we.” I included this quote for several reasons. Firstly, because it highlights the fact that these millstones are rock, something that is easy to overlook despite the word ‘stone’ appearing in their name, and due to their careful shaping by chisel. They could be mistaken for cast concrete, and sometimes the artwork that I have made from basalt is similarly misread. This has something to do with the blue-grey colour of the stone, but it also relates to the bubbles that are frozen in the surface of the material. This vesiculation, as it is known, would have once been pockets of gas that were trapped as the molten lava solidified.

Another reason for including the lines from Enos’s poem is because these millstones have life, just as we do, albeit life that we cannot fully know. Basalt is a material that wears a clue to its fluid beginnings, and perceiving these two stones also means considering the larger flow of material from which they were originally quarried. Once aware of this, we can then be led to thinking about the molten pools of liquid magma circulating beneath us in the Earth’s asthenosphere, the source of this lava. There are scales of temporality and geography/ geology at play within this material that defy easy comprehension, and these millstones have a life history that sits within a geological time frame. They also have a liveliness that occurs at a molecular level, unfolding in the complex relationships with the environments and more-than-human world they have been in proximity to, existing beyond the sensory perception of humans.’

Kenzee Patterson, *Seven Sleepers*, 2023, diffused water and ink on gallery wall, 8 x 2.1m. Photography by Jessica Maurer.
Image Description: a wide-shot of an individual wearing a black top, rust-coloured pants and black sandals standing before a mural within the gallery space. The mural, positioned on a white wall which runs the width of the image, consists of seven rectangular shapes painted on the wall, positioned at different angles. Each rectangular shape consists of a range of colours (purple, yellow, green, blue, red) overlapping each other as they curve in organic lines (within the dimensions of the rectangular shape). Although the colours are distinct, they appear slightly faint.

Maker unknown, *A pair of millstones used at Thomas West’s Barcom Glen water mill on Gadigal Country/Paddington, New South Wales, Australia, c. 1812 - 1830* (detail), vesicular bassalt with dressed (carved) faces, metal pallets, foam-covered chocks, runner stone (a): 290mm x 1210mm, bedstone (b): 300mm x 1250mm, lent by the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney, presented by Mr Edward T West, Mrs E M Loder and Mrs A B Ellis, 1906, collection object number C4011. Photography by Jek Maurer.
Image Description: A close-up image of a millstone, capturing one edge of the millstone (at the top of the image), the hollowed centre of the millstone and the area of the millstone that directly surrounds this hollowed centre. Looking at the millstone this closely, it is difficult to define its colour using one sweeping term as a variety of tones are present within the millstone; from dark charcoal to lighter grey and cream tones. The millstone does not have a smooth surface - long straight lines have been carved into its surface. These carved lines seem to extend outward from the millstone’s hollowed centre. The hollowed centre is angular in nature, consisting of a main square-like form, with shallower rectangular forms extending from each side the centre square.

(Yielding… continued)

'KP: I want to emphasise this last point, because while Mitch and I have been getting to know these millstones over the past two years, we recognise that we will not comprehend them absolutely. Ours is an artistic inquiry, following the leads suggested by the stone itself with no endpoint in mind, and we accept that the findings may be inconclusive. We are motivated by speculation into the cycles of material and bodily displacement represented by the millstones and the basalt they are carved from. This is a movement of the human and more-than-human across bodies of water including the Great Ocean, which is tied to both violent colonial expansion and intricate networks of voyaging and exchange.

In our interaction with these stones, we have adopted modes of inquiry native to other disciplines like history and archaeology. We have participated in truly interdisciplinary collaboration with geologists and archaeologists, generating new knowledge about the provenance of the millstones. Sometimes artist-led research like this has real world implications in terms of our understanding of histories and objects. These details are important because they can help to reframe accepted narratives, and this is work that is especially important in the context of Australia’s violent history of invasion and ongoing colonisation. To refer once more to Enos’s poem, these rocks aren’t dumb; they speak some of their story if we know how to listen.

MC: We encountered these stones in a museological context which frames them not as the active, agentic matter that Kenzee describes, but as relics of a sort. Their use-value as millstones having been exhausted, they came to rest in the collection as static checkpoints in a historical narrative of linear, industrial progress. This speaks very clearly to the way the Earth has been perceived within a dominant Western ontology: valued for its productive potential in service of the human, as a resource to be ab-used (literally used up) before being cast back into the category of the inert. And so our initial engagement with the stones was driven by a desire to reanimate them or, rather, to point out that they remain active in and of themselves…’