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Sounding Botany Bay

Coast Splash Zone Yenna Gap
A mosaic produced at Yenna Gap of the tannin-rich waters of the spalsh zone and bog.

February 8 – March 31, 2016

The inter-media exhibition Sounding Botany Bay presents documentary photographs, audio compositions, and videos of Botany Bay – one of Australia’s most significant cultural and natural sites – made by artist and 2006 Fullbright Senior Scholar, Timothy Nohe. The rich voices, sounds, and sights of the bay are blended into an aural and visual landscape that heightens and contrasts what is and has been, so that the visitor may experience the past and contemporary complexity of Botany Bay while reflecting on its future, and that of other shifting landscapes around the globe, near and far.

Audio

Clapping In Maria Nugent
Tangled Pipes
Oyster Depot
This 2009 image reflects a significant reimagining of the national park at Kurnell to view the site as the meeting place between two cultures, that of the indigenous people of the bay and the mission of Cook. Under the management of National Parks and Wildlife Service, historian Dr. Maria Nugent, and Aboriginal elders much design and interpretation work was done to balance the Aboriginal and European historical and cultural interpretation of the place. This is evidenced in the renaming of the park as Kamay Botany Bay National Park and transforming the longstanding Commemoration Day ceremony as the Meeting of Cultures ceremony. Over the course of the documentary, and continuing now Aboriginal people are integral to planning, stewardship and interpretation of this site with a fraught history.

Man from the La Perouse community holding an Eastern Fiddler Ray after a storm. Image made during the repatriation of aboriginal remains at a place of safe-keeping, Towra.

Public Program

4:00 p.m. Tuesday

February 16, 2016

Artist’s Talk​: Timothy Nohe

Timothy Nohe​ is an artist and educator engaging traditional and electronic media in daily life and public places. His artwork has been focused on sustainability and place, intermedia works, and sound scores for dance and video. Nohe was the recipient of a 2006 Fulbright Senior Scholar Award from the Australian-American Fulbright Commission Fulbright Alumni InitiativeGrant in 2011. Four Maryland State Arts Council awards have supported his work in the area of music Composition, Non-Classical; Media; New Genre, and Installation/Sculpture. Nohe has also been recognized with a Creative Baltimore Award. In 2015 the Warnock Foundation recognized his interdisciplinary work in urban forests with a Social Innovator award. He is the founding director of the Center for Innovation, Research and Creativity in the Arts (CIRCA) and a tenured professor of Visual Arts at UMBC. Nohe has strong ties to Australia, where he serves as an adjunct Professor at La Trobe University, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences; as an artist in Residence at the Centre for Creative Arts at La Trobe University, and on the editorial board of the peer-reviewed journal Unlikely, based in Melbourne.

Installation Views

Watch the video

The presentation of this exhibition at UMBC is supported in part by an arts program grant fromthe Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the State of Maryland and the NationalEndowment for the Arts. Additional support comes from Friends of the Library & Gallery, theLibby Kuhn Endowment, the Center for Innovation, Research and Creativity in the Arts (CIRCA),the Dresher Center for the Humanities and individual contributors.Support for the ongoing artistic research project ​Sounding Botany Bay​ comes from theAustralian-American Fulbright Commission, and the University of Wollongong.