Second Nature, Third Space


08.03.24 - 14.03.24

Opening Night | Activation: 8 March 6PM - 9PM


When history isn’t recorded, it is kept in the earth.


Second Nature, Third Space is Dean Ansell’s first solo exhibition; a personal, cultural, and spiritual exploration into his ancestral bloodline, the Riḡorabana and the Balawaia, whose lands and waters reside in the Rigo area of Papua Niugini. He materialises his experience with geographic displacement by imprinting impressions of his familiar landscape and intertwining them with sound recordings sent from his motherland, all within the interior of the exhibition space. The amalgamation of copper, bearing scars of the environment, of creek boulder cracks located at his paternally colonised property, and sounds recorded from Balawaian sacred lands, serves as an expression of his endeavour to reconcile with his Anglo-Melanesian identity.

Through experimentation with earth materials such as water, copper, and wood, alongside the channelling of ancient Balawaian legend, lamentation, and ritual, this body of work poses the question of whether the gallery space can serve as a conduit for new land-scapes and cultural “third spaces”. Utilising contact microphones, audiences are invited to awaken the space, causing sounds to reverberate through its interior and resonate within materials from the natural environment.

On Friday 8 March 2024 from 6 - 9 PM, an embodied sound performance conducted by Ansell where he enacts gori (legend), mourns with his ancestors, channels Riḡorabana ḡalluka babalau (creek spirits), and partakes in ginikoi (cleanse by water).