Queen Victoria Gardens

A slow-publishing artwork gives voice to minerals 

Lost Rocks (2025): End of an Era is part artwork, part durational platform and part publishing experiment by A Published Event. It’s a library of 43 books, by 46 contemporary artists who’ve each immersed themselves in a seam of mineralogical, metaphysical and metallurgical storytelling.   

This event is ten years in the making, and it finally brings Lost Rocks to life, in the pavilion. It’ll be a participatory session, where many of the work’s artists/authors, as well as friends and supporters, will read from then distribute Lost Rocks ‘fictiōnellas’.  

Readers include Justy Phillips, Margaret Woodward, Lyndal Jones, Trent Walter, Katie Stackhouse, Sarah Jones, Polly Stanton, Wendy Morrow, Mary Scott, Julie Gough, Greg Lehman, Jerry de Gryse, as well as audio/visual practitioner Christopher Henschke, who’ll be performing a live sound work with his reading. Join these artists, writers and researchers as they celebrate geologies of felt experience and more-than-human connection. 

Schedule

Collaborators 

A Published Event is the collaborative partnership of Justy Phillips and Margaret Woodward. They work with artists and writers, materials and ideas, writing, prose, book-works and performance. In 2019, A Published Event were awarded the Ruth Stephan Fellowship at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University and the Josef + Anni Albers Studio Residency, Connecticut. In 2021 the artists will take up their Studio Residency at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASSMoCA), US.

Justy Phillips is a conceptual artist who works with language, materials and ideas, book-works and performance. In 2019, Justy was awarded the Ruth Stephan Fellowship at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University and her book Ringed by Language And Yet, was published in 2022 by Upswell Publishing. Justy graduated from the Royal College of Art, London in 1999.

Margaret Woodward‘s work focuses on ‘divining’ geological and personal histories entangled in the places we call home. Her creative practice combines walking, archival research, writing and publishing in response to place. In 2024 Margaret was the recipient of the inaugural Creative Fellowship at the State Library of Tasmania. In 2017 Woodward’s publications, ‘Crocoite’ and ‘Fall of the Derwent’ were long-listed as finalists in the Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Awards.

Lyndal Jones is an Australian feminist and artist who addresses sexuality and ecological concerns through long-term projects usually shown as performances and video installations, led by women, focusing on the spoken word. She represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 2001. Other Biennales include the Kwangju Biennale 1997 and the Biennale of Sydney 1982, 1986, 1996, and 2012. The Avoca Project (2005-2020) was a direct address to global heating.

Christopher Henschke is an artist who works with audiovisual media and experimental science; and has undertaken various residencies and collaborations including the National Gallery of Australia, 2004; the Australian Synchrotron, 2007-2010; the CSIRO nanomaterials lab, 2018-2019; and the European Organisation for Nuclear Research / CERN, 2014-2018, and 2024 through the Australian Network for Art & Technology Synapse Fellowship.

Trent Walter is a Sri Lankan/Australian artist, printer and curator based in Naarm, Melbourne. His practice is defined by an interdisciplinary approach between these roles within the framework of being in-between: the edges of these roles and identities are porous and often bleed into one another. Walter established Negative Press in 2009 which operates as a print and book making studio in Brunswick, Victoria where Walter works with artists and cultural institutions on printed matter.

Katie Stackhouse is an Australian artist living and working in Naarm/Melbourne. Examining notions of time within landscapes, contemporary human interactions with natural environments and emerging experiential technologies. Her sculptural, spatial and performance-based practice is informed by scientific and philosophical research surrounding ecologies. Stackhouse has a BFA, studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Art Academy (NL) and holds a Master of Contemporary Art from the VCA. Her work is included in private collections throughout Australia, Europe, Japan and the USA.

Sarah Jones is a writer, curator and horticulturalist living and working on unceded Wadawurrung Country (Australia). Sarah holds an MFA from the Dutch Art Institute (NL) and a PhD: Publishing as Process: The essay as system and as swerve, 2020, from the University of New South Wales (AU). Sarah is a co-founder and editor of independent small press, Ranch Pressing. Ranch Pressing publishes limited edition art, design, poetry and critical theory books on found, recycled and secondhand stock on a wildly unreliable collection of discarded printers.

Polly Stanton is an artist and filmmaker who currently lives and works in Narrm/Melbourne, Australia. Her work primarily investigates the relationships between environment, human actions and land use. Her films and installations focus on contested sites and extractive zones, presenting landscape as a politically charged field of negotiation, entangled with history, technology and capital.

Wendy Morrow is a dancer, teacher and collaborator who grew up within a family of dancers, trained at the Australian Ballet School in the early 70s before pursuing a career as a professional dancer in Australia and overseas. She has performed with the Monte Carlo Ballet, The Scottish Ballet, The Sydney Dance Company and Danceworks and as an independent artist whose work is deeply rooted in the kinaesthetic and the presence of the imaginative body.

Mary Scott is a visual artist and writer with 36 years of experience. Her artwork is mainly produced for curated exhibitions and site-responsive commissions, both within Australia and internationally. She is also an enthusiastic arts educator, and mentor who advocates for artists through her involvement board and advisory roles.
Website: maryscott.au

Julie Gough is an artist, writer and curator, First People’s Art and Culture, at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG), Australia. Gough’s multi-media artworks often reveal and re-present conflicting and subsumed histories, legacies and impacts of colonization, sometimes referring to her family’s experiences as Tasmanian Aboriginal people.

Greg Lehman is a descendant of the Trawulwuy people of northeast Tasmania, and a Professorial Fellow at the University of Tasmania. He holds a Master of Studies in the History of Art and Visual Cultures from Oxford, and a PhD in Art History from the University of Tasmania, where he is currently a Professorial Fellow. Greg is a curator and writer, a well-known Tasmanian art historian and essayist on Indigenous history, identity and place.

Jerry de Gryse is a landscape architect and raconteur, whose working life has revolved around the landscape since aged 8 when he started mowing lawns in his east side neighbourhood in Detroit. Over the past 45 years, Jerry and his landscape architecture practice, Inspiring Place, has had a leading role in the planning, design and management of Tasmania’s natural and built landscapes for the health of the community and the planet. 

Participating artists (audio): Tom Blake & Dominique Chen, Siddhearth Pandey, Jane Rendell, Ally Bisshop, James Newitt, Bianca Hester, Catherine Rose Evans, Erica Van Horn, Nancy Kuhl, Robin Banks, and Tricky Walsh.