An Introduction — by Jane Giblin

Historical records reveal no research focussing on Penwarne Mitchells’ works. Congruently, there is very little evidence of documentary drawing by 19th century women, using pen, ink, and wash as their primary medium (Jordan email 2022 ref). Recent research by Wiertz (2020) into the way nonprofessional or amateur artists such as Penwarne Mitchell have been overlooked by scholarly researchers reveals instead that these artists have an important role to play in our understanding of pace, culture, and art history. Through studio based practical research this project will consider what an experimental drawing practice might learn from the Mitchell Scrapbook.

Drawings made by 19th Century women were constrained by convention. (Jordan 2020) This project seeks to research how pen, ink, and wash drawing methodologies freed of those conventions, can be used to offer new understandings of a period in Tasmanian colonial life. Using practice-based research this project will examine drawing discourses separated by 150 years. It will consider how archival material can be translated to open speculation and empathy about a period in Australian colonial history. It seeks to reanimate the work of the female archivists and artists whose voices form the heart of this project.

My aim is to interweave historical and contemporary drawing methods to encourage speculative new readings about the Mitchell archive. To do this, my research is founded on the following questions:

How can fluid drawing processes that include liquidity, tracing, layering, and scratching, reanimate and evoke empathetic engagement with the authors of a 150-year-old archive?

How can drawing help define a shared sense of place within artworks that depict my forbears?

The depiction, in pen and ink, of 19th century everyday life and community by a Tasmanian born woman (R.S.T. 38) is virtually absent from the historical canon of Australian art. Recent research by Jordan (2005) reveals that Lucy Gray (1840 – 1879), a colonial immigrant to Queensland, also worked in pen and ink. Gray’s works however were embedded as very small illustrations to her journals and letters. Produced as a pictorial record of Gray’s surrounding environment they were not a document of everyday life, nor did they depict more than one or two people (Vivers 2013).

Catherine Penwarne Mitchell’s work, and that of her sister Sarah Mitchell (aided by Grace Mitchell), falls within the recently acknowledged and growing field of research concerning the status and cultural role of the amateur or nonprofessional artist between the 17th and 19th centuries (Wiertz 2020).

My research examines how a contemporary drawing practice using pure tracing as a departure point, may translate the interconnected annotations by the archivist in addition to the drawings she archived. Discourses of mark – making techniques and compositional devices are examined through a range of artists’ approaches to contemporary drawing and their theoretical archival contexts.

Some background 

Both sides of my father’s families have 19th century colonial Tasmanian origins. Each was contextualised by the island coastal landscapes of Lutruwita/Tasmania. One side, matriarchal and Irish in origin, was deeply rural and affected by their poverty and station. The other, patriarchal, and English, and similarly rural, benefitted from greater relative wealth and station. Each of these families relied on boating, as well as their horses and carts, for transport and pleasure. The patriarchal side of the family, however, enjoyed a life of education, and the support of their servants and employees.

My father’s matriarchy centres around the Furneaux Islands of Tasmania and using his archival resources including previously unprinted archival negatives, I used ink and pigment-based drawing, lithography, and analogue photography, to research his family’s evolving rural traditions. A subsequent project used that original photographic archive to translate a contemporary relationship to place. I gazed into the emerging faces of people long gone and re-animated them in a new body of work entitled The Carapace. It translated and enshrined our archived past, through its children, and a narrative responding to the pragmatism of modern Furneaux life.

Aware of my family-based investigations, a past student alerted me to a tiny online image of one 19th century Minnie (Mary Anne) Giblin, one of my father’s patriarchal ancestors. Minnie’s image was scattered among the three hundred or so pages of the Mitchell Scrapbook. As I explored the exquisitely fragile assemblage, gazing into the finely drawn faces, I realised that I was wandering through the life of the woman who made the drawings. During my past 40 years of teaching art history, I’d never seen such drawings. They possess beauty, and the naïve hand of a maker, clearly learning to record her life in pen and ink on paper. During my childhood, my father illustrated our birthday cards with pen and ink drawings, providing a distinctive visual connection to our landscape. My father’s tools and techniques underscore my studio practice today. Inside the Mitchell Scrapbook I could see that Catherine Penwarne Mitchell enjoyed her tools just as much as I do. I felt an immediate affinity for her vision.

In the Mitchell Scrapbook archive I met an ancestral family, with a different connection to place. Their wealth afforded them greater recreation on landscape once occupied by Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Although conflicted by this fact, the Mitchell and Giblin family idyll, supported by a lower class, which happened to be just like the Furneaux side of the family, really struck home. What could I learn, as an artist, from the Mitchell Scrapbook?

While exploring Catherine Penwarne Mitchell’s documentation of an idyllic life, I yearn to empathise with her growing relationship to this place. How did her family feel as they picnicked on middens, traversing well-worn tracks and rocky cliffs and waterways wrested only 30 years before from First Nation peoples? Was she simply

learning to love their home, as she amassed her 200 unconventional pen and ink drawings? The Special and Rare librarians confirmed that while a few others noted her drawings, they remained unstudied and unrecognised.

This research project will use speculative processes of artmaking to examine and reanimate the life emerging from the archive. It aims to engage in practice led research that acknowledges the importance of this archive of 19th Century work.

Some project dimensions, parameters, and limitations  

Informed by archival theory, this project’s practice lead research is guided by two methodological strategies. These are ‘denkbild’ and ‘discourse’.

The first applies to the way the characteristic of an image can encourage an audience to think. The term, loosely defined as ‘thought image’ was originally formed by The Frankfurt School of writers and philosophers who sought a categorisation of writing which, embodies potential ideas, without directly stating those ideas (Richter, 1967). Grootenboer (2022) encompasses the term within the field of art as the ‘Pensive Image’. This research uses the word ‘denkbild’ for simplicity.

The second, ‘discourse’, applies to language, and using Foucault’s (1969) framework, this research acknowledges the particularly gendered contingency of a drawing language separated by 150 years.

I had the drawings in the Mitchell Scrapbook photographed to protect the original archive and to supply source material for research. Once projected on to my studio walls, the resulting digital enlargement provides closer inspection of the properties of the archive. This examination during initial studio research revealed the once liquid characteristic of the tiny, archived drawings. I knew that I could pursue the hand of the original maker with a similar liquid drawing method. It is primarily drawing, in this case the fluid characteristics of ink, nib, and line and pigment in relationship to a paper matrix, which form my discourse.

Archival theory provides a framework for the way we interact with, understand, and reflectively, contingently, celebrate archival material. As such, it underpins the ways this project investigates archival residue, time, memory, cataloguing, protection, and access. In this project it will emerge through strategic selections made from the Mitchell Scrapbook, and how the contexts depicted in these selections engage my fluid drawing practice as activated sites for learning.  It not only opens the content through discourses of drawing but also through gentle and subtle composition, so that speculative denkbild is supported.

This project’s foundation is the compelling authenticity of handmade archival material. In reaching back into the vestiges of past hands at work, using research methods characterised by liquid tracing, replication, memory, transformation, and translation, this project argues that a contemporary hand heightens and augments the authenticity of the archive. While the minute scratches of ink and aged soft papers are protected by their institutional storage, this project’s redrawing of the archive reanimates its material substance.

This specifically inclusive project acknowledges the collaborative contributions of the three women who built the archive. The first is Catherine Penwarne Mitchell the original maker of the drawings in the Mitchell Scrapbook. The second contribution is through the Sarah Mitchell’s collation and annotation and finally, there are the additional annotations by Grace Mitchell. My research acknowledges the presence throughout the archive of these women.  I hope to examine the Mitchell Scrapbook’s past discourses without concealment and yet enfolded within a contemporary discourse, all voices will remain vocal and therefore, alive. In this conversation, the past remains inherent in the present (Foucault 1969). This research argues that the collective results form a new archive characterised by several fluid discourses in collaboration across time.

The voices of three women offer avenues for mediation and speculation. Their narratives exist as drawing and three layers of annotation. The drawing techniques once defined by tradition and control differ enough from my present-day opportunity to take greater risks, that a tension is evident. This research project exploits this tension by tracing the original marks, in liquid. These traced marks soaked into paper, leach upwards; they reach out. They remain a visible foundation beneath my replications and layered translations.

In confining this research’s strategy between a fluid drawing discourse and compositions defined by denkbild within the broader field of practice led archival research defined by Foster (2004) and Callahan (2022), I argue that my artistic practice has the potential to engineer speculation about this research project’s specific nineteenth-century social and historical contexts.  Further, my project examines how drawing-based research encourages feelings of connection and empathy. This project provides a more nuanced understanding of my sense of belonging and relationship to place. I am asked to attend to the past so that I reflect on my present circumstances (Callahan 2022).

While it recognises its postcolonial historical context, this research project excludes allegory or ironic historical quotation, and does not seek to reclaim language, iconography, or Indigenous cultural narrative, it does consider, however, what David Hansen (2007) refers to as postcolonial parallax picture making; the potential for divergent thinking within a drawing language.

It might be that this project,

“Articulates the difference between historical and contemporary perspectives, allowing us to not only critique past attitudes but to see our own as every bit as contingent and ideologically conditioned as those of the Georgian and Victorian colonisers” (Hansen 2007).

Through the re-enactment of archival content, whereby I attempt to draw and photograph descendants of the original human subjects in some of the archive’s original sites, and methodology developed from the original Penwarne Mitchell techniques, the research considers the role of memory in the archive’s collation, the making of its drawings, and in the later annotation of the archive. Convoluted narratives of fact and fiction will play out as I orchestrate vignettes selected from the archive and sediment its layers of drawing with my own. These uncertainties may diminish or consolidate, and in this speculative realm, fiction has power (Smith 2016).

My recent research reveals little evidence of a descendent artist researching drawn representations of colonial life which include the depiction of their own ancestors. Dr Julie Dowling, for example, an Australian First Nation artist re-presents her family members and ancestors, from photographic documentation. Her works are imbued with her decolonised and political heart (Dowling 2022) but they are not derived from drawings. Dr Katy Woodroffe, whose ancestors are also depicted within the Mitchell Scrapbook, uses her practice to examine her ancestors, but through the re-configuration of symbolic objects and symbolic stand-in representations. Neither of these contemporary Australian artists use the extant archival drawn depictions of their ancestors.

Ultimately, in using a research method that I have affinity with to revitalise an archive of work by someone I suspect had the same affinity, I might locate herself and myself in this colonised place. The result may even substantiate contingent and anachronistic instability. By what claim can I call this, or any place, my home? Considering our geopolitical contexts, and researched through our distinctive, yet familiar liquid drawing discourses, I hope not only to stimulate speculation about this rich archive, but additionally, to celebrate the women behind it.