The Archive as Liberation
The Aaronel deRoy Gruber & Irving Gruber Gallery
Silver Eye Center for Photography
March 6 - April 19, 2025
An Inseparable Trinity: To Unearth, To Excavate, To Exhume, 2025
An Inseparable Trinity: To Cut, To Fell, To Wound, 2025
An Inseparable Trinity: To Taint, To Pollute, To Contaminate, 2025
A Precolonial Image Against a Postcolonial Landscape, 2025
Employing a counter-archival approach, these works explore the impact of historical gold extraction on the Box-Ironbark forest and woodland ecologies of Victoria, Australia.
The local activist group Friends of the Box-Ironbark Forests state “that the health of the land is intimately linked to its vegetation cover and the wildlife it sustains: that forests, soil and water are ‘an inseparable trinity.’”
Drawing on art historian and curator Yuval Etgar’s definition of collage as a synonym for trouble, which has “a long history of illicit acts: cutting, tearing, stealing, covering up, pretending, and, above all, disrupting expectations that things can be whole and perfect, in one piece,” Lyon uses the state’s archive against itself. Her work focuses on ecological damage, making visible the devastation to soil, forests, and water caused by gold extraction.
These ecologies have been stripped, turned over, and polluted through extensive tree felling, soil extraction, and water usage since the beginning of the gold rush in 1851. This destruction continues today through contemporary gold mining operations. Scientists estimate that eighty-three percent of these ecosystems have been destroyed, making Box-Ironbark ecologies one of the most endangered habitats in Australia.
The imagery used in An Inseparable Trinity was sourced from state and national archives, which provide public access to settler-colonial artifacts—drawings, paintings, illustrations, and photographs—created from 1851 through the early 1900s. These images documented life on the gold fields and continue to perpetuate the colonial imaginary—an image of grit, economic prosperity, progress, and nation-building. Drawing on poet Brian Teare, Lyon is interested in these images for the way they “…make the state do the work of incriminating itself, its meticulous memory offering damning and ample evidence of its crimes.”
Image Credits: State Library of Victoria, National Library of Australia
