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Prospects
Prospects - Ken Orchard & Ed Douglas
Re-imaging gold country at Ophir and Hill End.
Works on paper and photographs produced following a collaborative project by Ken Orchard and Ed Douglas under the auspices of the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery's Artists in Residency program at Hill End, NSW.
In 2007, South Australian artists Ken Orchard and Ed Douglas undertook a collaborative artists’ residency concentrating on a number of key sites in NSW which are pivotal to the mining history of the nation: Ophir, the Turon valley and Hill End and Carcoar.
Ophir is the first site where “payable gold” was discovered in 1851. The discovery of gold brought a wide range of people from many countries and occupations, including artists and photographers, to the goldfields. The noted travel artist George French Angas made some of the earliest published images of the gold fields to record the remarkable event.
Over the next two decades gold was discovered at other sites. By 1872 Hill End boasted a mile of shops that included an oyster bar and several opium dens, 27 hotels and, depending on whom one believes, up to 30,000 people. This thriving town attracted two travelling photographers, Beaufoy Merlin and Charles Bayliss, who worked in the region from 1870 – 75.
Drawing on this rich visual history, Ken Orchard and Ed Douglas have produced a major exhibition that reflects their deep engagement with this regional landscape. The show is exquisitely wrought in their chosen media – ink drawings, layered pastels, and traditional hand printed black and white photographs.
Ken Orchard chose to work with many of the same views captured by Angas 156 years earlier, while Ed Douglas photographed many of the vistas that Merlin and Bayliss had recorded for posterity. Throughout the exhibition viewers will be intrigued by the numerous linkages and contrasts between Orchard’s fluid sketches and richly coloured drawings, and Douglas’ highly considered black and white photographs.
Additionally a number of Angas’ early lithographs and Merlin and Bayliss’ original albumen silver photographs are included in the exhibition.
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