Kath Fries Studio: Fremantle Arts Centre WA artist-in-residence

I'm currently artist-in-residence at Fremantle Art Centre WA. It's an interesting place with its beautiful old buildings, sunsets over the ocean and vibrant cultural scene. Located on the southern side of the city of Perth at the mouth of the Swan River, the traditional owners of this area are the Whadjuk Noongar people. An important colonial port and convict settlement, Fremantle is renowned for its well-preserved architectural heritage. The two buildings I'm working in both date back to colonial times, the artist-in-residence apartment is in the Moores Building - a converted old storehouse near the port, and up the road I have a studio in Fremantle Arts Centre, which was originally the local lunatic asylum.

Fremantle Arts Centre AIR Studio - beeswax and old fashioned boiler

I've sourced some local beeswax for my residency project. Western Australia claims to produce some of the purest honey in the world, being so remote has some benefits - the honeybees here suffer from fewer of the pests and diseases that plague other parts of Australia and the rest of the world.

Fremantle Arts Centre AIR studio

These three windows of my studio face west and catch the afternoon sunlight

Like most of the old buildings here, Fremantle Arts Centre (FAC) was built from local stone with convict labour. Today FAC is vibrant with music concerts, performances, exhibitions and artists studios; but its history of convict labour, insanity and poverty lingers in the building's shadows with textured layers of spooky intrigue. My usual studio in Sydney at Sydney College of the Arts is a former psychiatric hospital, so it has a lot in common with FAC, and this place seems like an ideal site to continue working on my Divest installation project.

Day one ofFAC Divest installation, work in progress - beeswax on window

Day two of FAC Divest installation, work in progress - beeswax on window

Day three of FAC Divest installation, work in progress - beeswax on window and floor

In my FAC studio space there are three windows that face west and catch the afternoon sunlight. A number of my beeswax installations over the past year have been situated on windows with direct sunlight coming through them. I'm drawn to watching sunlight permeate interior spaces, and how the shadows' progression across the room tracks the passage of time and the uniqueness of that particular day.

Day three of FAC Divest installation, work in progress - beeswax on floor

The beeswax funnels in Divest are made by wrapping warm pieces of beeswax around my fingers in a healing bandaging gesture. Then one edge is stretched, torn and thinned out into a marbled, fingerprinted, membrane like transparency. Natural light from the window illuminates the brittle edges of the clustered barnacle like funnels. Positioned in the corners and crevices of the studio space, they imply the porousness of our artificial boundaries, as though a colony of insects or crustaceans have invaded and inhabited this interior human space, then absconded and left their shell-funnel homes empty and abandoned.

Day three of FAC Divest installation, work in progress

Day four of FAC Divest installation, work in progress, beeswax on window

Day five of FAC Divest installation, work in progress, beeswax on window

Divest is a process based project that considers cycles of healing, renewal, fragility, abandonment and entropy. The actual making and placing of the warm beeswax funnels is the pivotal stage of the work, so the resulting installation becomes just a trace of the process. The funnels are empty, although they look as though they may have contained insects or small sea creatures, what they actually held were human fingers. This embodied imprint links to ancient practices of using beeswax in healing and embalming processes, and questions the separation we often feel from nature in our contemporary lives today.