Podcast transcript
The art of the abandoned
Neil Fettling
Audio
You can also listen to the interview [MP3 10.5MB].
iTunes
Visit this channel at La Trobe on iTunesU.
Transcript
- Matt Smith
Hello. This is me, Matt Smith, welcoming you, the listener to a La Trobe University podcast. My guest today is Neil Fettling. He’s the Director of the Mildura Campus of La Trobe University and we’ll cover a bit of that initially, but after that, we’ll get into his art. He’s doing a PhD project at the moment, and well, it gets a bit complicated, so it’s best if I let him explain it.
- Neil Fettling
Yeah, I think the smaller regional campuses are by definition, there is a tendency where you become a jack of all trades and the Campus Director is a fractional position so .5 of me is responsible for taking the duties of that position, but then the other .5 sees me teaching and providing supervision for post-graduate students here at the campus in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.
- Matt Smith
You’ve come from an art background. You were teaching art-related subjects before.
- Neil Fettling
I was the Coordinator of Visual Arts and Design here at the campus for many years and then more recently I was appointed the Faculty Coordinator, so that position required me to take, I suppose, coordination responsibilities right across the faculty, so the Bachelor of Arts as well as the Visual Arts and Design streams.
- Matt Smith
You’re also studying your PhD?
- Neil Fettling
I am indeed.
- Matt Smith
Because you don’t need to be busier. So tell me about that. What are you studying? How far into it are you?
- Neil Fettling
I'm at the submission end of my PhD. It’s been a long process. I’ve been studying it part time for around seven or eight years. The scope of my PhD is in this region. I'm looking at North-West Victorian communities and their sustainability through their financial kind of status. You know, as they drop population and become smaller, how they become sort of very marginal, and what keeps them alive. I'm doing this through fine arts, so I have been exhuming objects from long-abandoned informal dumps through the Mallee community, so these are dumps that farming communities, prior to council garbage pickup services. So in many instances these farmers kind of, in bad times of drought, where they couldn’t sell their crops, would leave the area, would go bankrupt and so on. I'm kind of telling histories and the sociologies of these communities through what they throw away. So I'm collecting the secular relics and part of my PhD research is looking at the notion of the symbolic power of the secular relic. I always tell the story that when my mother died in 1997, the slippers beside her bed the morning after she died, were different objects than the ones that were there the night before she died. The symbolic power of objects as signifiers of the people who owned them. So I'm looking at these objects that often are the only remnant of people who tried to sustain a livelihood out in these areas for forty or fifty years, but now have disappeared.
- Matt Smith
Say, for example, you’ll go to a site, you’ll dig up – is it fossicking?
- Neil Fettling
Well, I think it’s more fossicking with a purpose. Prior to formalised recycling, most farmers would find low areas of landform that we used to dump things into and generally the surface is a bit of a give-away, there’ll be kind of shards or remnants of various things, and I'm not just kind of blindly fossicking – I'm looking for a purpose, so I work with kind of the rusty tinned food receptacles that have been cast out, and they generally end up in pits of a certain kind of form, and then I might be looking at the white goods of polystyrene containers, or currently my PhD research is exhuming items of footwear. You know, the work boots, the stilettos, the kids’ sandals, the whole range of shreds that end up underground, the fragments of them, and they tell stories of the people who once wore them.
- Matt Smith
So how old are these objects that you’re working with?
- Neil Fettling
The history of settlements in this region go back to very early settlements around the 1840s, but most people came in around 1910 and then immediately following the First World War. So they are up to a hundred years, but certainly very rarely they’d be older than that.
- Matt Smith
And I’ve heard it said before when talking to archaeologists that if you want to find out how people really lived, how their every day to day life is, you look at their garbage and their rubbish.
- Neil Fettling
Yeah. I'm very interested in the contemporary archive, but also museologies. I'm interested in what maybe two and a half thousand years ago, in the city of Corinth, the people would sit around and they would drink the contents of a black figured amphora and then throw it into a pit and then two and a half thousand years later, we excavate it because this object reveals something about the culture that threw it away two and a half thousand years ago. So that’s the role I suppose of archaeology. Certainly the more contemporary secular object communicates to us in a different way. You know, it’s the secrets of more recent sort of communities is widely known to us, but that’s where I'm starting to kind of play with the symbolic power of those objects as something that can reveal parts of our society.
- Matt Smith
You said at the start that it’s to do as well with sustainability of small townships and communities. What are these objects showing you in relation to that?
- Neil Fettling
A lot of the smaller parishes and communities where I'm exhuming these objects are basically disappearing. Even the last sixty, seventy years, you find these little communities that once supported a Post Office, a pub, a general store, you know, all of those services are largely retracting. Just like the items of footwear – there’s an interesting symbolism about the fact that these are discarded. They’ve diminished in many ways. You know, they’ve broken down, they’re starting their cycle of returning to the earth. You know, there’s some nice sort of parallels with some of these kind of objects and their relationship to the communities that they once were from.
- Matt Smith
Where does the art aspect of it come in? What do you do with these objects?
- Neil Fettling
That’s a really good question. I have been, like an archaeologist would, going through an evaluation and a documentation process of the objects and I have a large inventory of all the objects that I’ve exhumed and where they’ve come from. I will be kind of re-installing these objects into white sarcophagus shoe boxes, so it will be a kind of a life to death process, where the original shoes were born in a box and they go through a life and then they have a secondary life as an art object that will be kind of re-contextualised within a large installation of sarcophagus, funeral pieces, in a way. Concurrent with that, I have for the last three or four years, been laying shoes onto large pieces of paper and letting the dust settle on them, and then very soon, I will take the shoes off and reveal the empty footprint which will also kind of speak, I think, of the kind of transience of humanity. Notions of displacement about sustainability, of populations in semi-arid areas. Those large works on paper with, I suppose, the negative footprint, will play off the actual kind of items of footwear.
- Matt Smith
So what is it about shoes that speak to you about a person’s past? Why are you using footwear ...
- Neil Fettling
It’s not the only thing. With this project I'm interested in shoes because they are utilitarian objects, they are objects of desire, they are fetish objects, they do in a way represent all of the idiosyncrasies of our life, our working life, our social life, our domestic life. I think that’s interesting. As I said, I’ve worked with food processing cans, previously I’ve used other objects so I'm not kind of discretely into shoes as such. I'm interested in all the things we use as objects of post consumer society and as a way of kind of telling us about our society.
- Matt Smith
You can tell a lot about a person by their shoes I suppose.
- Neil Fettling
You can.
- Matt Smith
Did you check out mine when we came in?
- Neil Fettling
I didn’t. I can’t see them now ...
- Matt Smith
I'm wearing brown Converse shoes.
- Neil Fettling
Well, they’re not going to last long in the harsh landscape. I find the buckles and the leather straps and the fetish fur and things, they don’t last very long. And canvas.
- Matt Smith
On these digs that you’ve done, what is the most interesting or unexpected thing that you’ve found?
- Neil Fettling
I have a little object. It once was a plastic sort of upper ... a lot of these objects I found in the low lying salty basins of Lake Tyrrell, so this is a kind of highly saline area that at various times is under water, or otherwise the water level drops, and it’s been leached and blistered by hot summer temperatures. In prising this little kind of piece of upper from the bed of the lake, it kind of looked like a little fish. The objects that we made as part of sort of industrial methods, after a while, while they’ve been abandoned and discarded, they come back as kind of almost like a natural life again. So I think nature in combination with ruin, does provide some surprise at times.
- Matt Smith
That was Neil Fettling, artist, fossicker, filler of many sheds, and also Campus Director of Mildura at La Trobe University. And that’s all the time we have today for the La Trobe University podcast. If you have any questions, comments or feedback about this podcast, or any other, then send us an email at podcast@latrobe.edu.au.
Focused, Ambitious and Transformative ideas - 
