Up close with Kate McMillan
About Kate McMillan
Born 1974 in Hampshire, England
Lives and works in Perth, Australia
Kate McMillan’s photographs, videos and multimedia installations explore personal memory and the ability of landscape both to evoke and represent history and trauma. Islands have long held a fascination for the artist. Islands of incarceration (2010), a site-specific work specially made for a disused timber drying shed on Cockatoo Island, draws on the artist’s engagement with Australian colonial history. McMillan links two sites: Cockatoo Island, and the Ludlow Tuart Forest in south-west Western Australia – the site of the 1841 Wonnerup Massacre in which up to 300 Wardandi Noongar people are said to have been massacred and buried over a period of five years. Positioned at the top of Cockatoo Island, the work, in its weather-exposed position, is a poetic evocation of place that simultaneously watches over and haunts the island, itself a former prison. Adding to the sense of unease, a soundtrack, composed of sounds almost below human hearing range, has been made in collaboration with sound artist Cat Hope.