Our AGM 2025 Address: Kate Hill.

Kate Hill was our guest speaker at the Friends’ 2025 AGM. Kate, an active Friends’ committee member for 5 years, recently moved to Canberra to take up a role as head of Ceramics in the ANU School of Art and Design.

Kate spoke to us on her PhD thesis — Digging: Handling the layers of material politics through the processing of local clay soils. Explored through her thesis, as academic, activist and artist, Kate leads us through a rich spectrum of interpretations and meanings for the merri merri and the other sites in Eltham and the King Valley.

While describing the Merri as a place of lush respite, alongside colourful contaminants, Kate’s work discusses the social and cultural politics embedded in all materials, showing us that creations are not separate from their source. Fundamental to this is placing the role of the colonial settler experience in our relationship to the landscape, geology and ecology of unceded landscapes.

During a 3-month residency, for the NECCHI, Newlands community house, Earthen Habitations, Kate co-ordinated a range of activities exploring the different forms and effects of urban habitations. The project worked to reactivate public spaces, by spending time with the creek’s ecology, gardens and collective plantings, conducting litter collections, taking educative walks, and designing and creating terracotta irrigation vessels for the gardens.

The residency also investigated the ideas of contamination in and along the merri merri.  Approaches to both legacy and contemporary toxicants and litter, show that collaboration is the key to survival. Learning from practitioners, meeting, and sharing with others the things that bring us to the creek helps to expand and enrich individual and collective meanings of the creek and parklands.

Germinations, Kate's PhD exhibition, included a series of events — litter collecting, weeding, listening and planting, culminating in an exhibition at correspondences gallery in Brunswick.

In Canberra, Kate is using the processes and discoveries from these diverse experiences to inform her pedagogy and curriculum development; and her art.

Thank you to Kate for coming to speak to us and giving us other ways to think about intersections of the merri merri with the past, the colonial settler presence and contemporary modes of consumption, creativity and activism.

More to explore:

• Kate Hill
• Digging: Handling the layers of material politics through the processing of local clay soils, PhD thesis, 2024
• Earthen habitations, May–June 2021
  Project at NECCHI community house.
  Activities: litter collection walks, geology walk and talk with ecologist Michael Longmore, MCMC, merri merri bird walk with Ann McGregor, FoMC, walking and making activities including terracotta irrigation vessels for the gardens, with clay from the land of the Dja Dja Wurrung and the Taungurung Peoples (near Bendigo), and some is from the land of the Kaurna people (South Australia).
• Germinations, May–June 2024
  Events were held at Green Reserve, Northcote, with an exhibition at correspondances gallery, Brunswick.
  Activities: Litter collection, planting, weeding.
  The exhibition included paper made from the collected weeds, terracotta forms made from King valley/Taungurang clay soils.
• We will never clean the creek, UNLIKELY — Journal for creative arts, Issue 09

merri merri bird walk with Ann McGregor, Earthern habitations, 2021, photo by Kate Hill. 

Terracotta irrigation vessels, Earthern habitations, 2021, photo by Kate Hill. 

Litter collection walk: [Polystyrene], Earthern habitations, 2021, photo by Kate Hill.

 

Germinations, 2024, exhibition catalogue

 

Floc(s), 2024. Refined clay soil and dross clay soil from Tarntanya/Adelaide, Kaurna Country, Germinations.
Photo by Craig Burgess.

Germinations, 2024. Paper made from plants collected at merri merri event #1 — weeding.
Photo by Craig Burgess.