Unseeded: bringing Australian boab trees to Canberra

Australian artist UK Frederick encourages visitors to use a torch when visiting the Unseeded exhibition at the Drill Hall Gallery.

The work features carefully crafted glass seeds that encourage you to take a step closer and explore what’s inside.

In doing so, colours of blue, red, and dappled green suture on shadow to reveal photographs that appear throughout the seed and project behind the wall. Refracted, fragmented and flickering with the light, it’s as though the images are unfolding like memories, from glimpses of a tree and landscape to people and their interactions with place.

The work is a melding of Frederick’s interests in both art and archaeology, having studied a masters in archaeology and completing her PhD at the School of Art and Design at The Australian National University (ANU).

“I was able to link my interests in archaeology to my creative practice,” says Frederick.

“I was able to do that through the art school, with cross supervision from different disciplines and with photography scholars like Helen Ennis, Martin Jolly alongside Melinda Hinkson and Howard Morphy, who are both anthropologists with a strong interest in art, material collections and material culture.”

Frederick uses photography, printmaking and video to unite the worlds of science and art. Her portrayal of people, and their connection to place is archaeological influences coming into play.

The Unseeded exhibition serves as a continuation of this art practice, with the small glass seeds telling a much larger story. A story that first took root more than 3,000km away from Canberra, in the heart of the Kimberley region of Western Australia.

“The Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH) had a program to commission artists to work with scientists,” says Frederick.

At the same time, Distinguished Professor Sue O’Connor from the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific was preparing to go on a field trip to Western Australia to uncover the sites and meeting places of First Nation Australians in the region. O’Connor and Frederick had worked together previously and it made perfect sense that the two would come together in collaboration and Frederick became the recipient of CABAH’s second Art Series commission.

“I didn’t know what to expect, but I like to go into a place to see its context and how I respond to it.

“During the field survey, we would drive along this road that ran alongside the range. We had this horizon of rock formations that created these caves. The Unseeded artwork is a series of forms that are meant to be reflective of that landscape.”

But as Frederick, O’Connor, and the rest of the archaeological team trekked deeper into Ningbing Range, it became clear that things weren’t going to plan – and the pressure on Frederick to choose a focus for her artwork mounted.

“One of the things that was becoming apparent on this fieldwork as it progressed was that the archaeologists weren’t really finding the kind of sites they had hoped to locate,” she says.

“There was a kind of extreme emotional register that I was picking up on, and that was really fascinating for me because it mirrored the uncertainty I was experiencing. Like, ‘oh my god, what am I going to make?’ Just like they were like, ‘Oh my God, are we going to ever find what we’re looking for?’

“That uncertainty and the searching for something was a key concept that emerged.”

Outside of these emotions, Frederick explains there was another thematic element taking root as a source of inspiration for her work – the boab tree.

Known for their scale and swollen elephantine trunks that arc from the soil to the sky, these ancient trees might be best summarised by a Ghanaian proverb: ‘wisdom is like a boab tree; no one individual can embrace it.’

Turning to these trees for answers meant Unseeded started to grow.

“In all of these places that they [the field team] were finding evidence for human occupation, or Indigenous peoples’ presence, were in shelters and caves where there were often really large boab trees immediately adjacent,” Frederick says

“These trees are really important to Indigenous people of the Kimberley and have been for millennia. The seeds could be used as snack food because they are a really high source of vitamin C, and you can carry it along with you.

“It just became clearer and clearer that the tree was an interesting metaphor and important evidence of human occupation.

“The seed obviously has potential, and that was exactly what we were looking for on the trip.”

Back in Canberra, Frederick worked with a glass team to transform her photographs into the boab seeds. Unique in size, shape and colour, each had its own story to tell – all that was left to do was listen.

“The glass creates a vehicle for looking, like a lens, back through time, the layers of time, but the glass seed also refers to the potential of the layers, the archaeological potential within the ground” says Frederick.

“It was intended to give the viewer the experience of looking as though they were going into these dark spaces like a cave; from the shadow, the high contrast of that shadow and then that projection of light.

“That interplay between art and science is exciting, and I think that there should be more of it.”