Act of looking – Julie Shiels

Unsettling the landscape

172 9 rev pine tree unknown light box copy 3

72 8 unknown 1835 map form June treaty-Recovered copy-topaz-text-upscale-2x copy

26 rv fitzroy Garden -new map 72jpg copy

16 72 unknown Grimes map 1803 copy-topaz-denoise-textai-enhance-4500w copy 2

72 39 mixed new planting 6 copy-topaz-text-upscale-5900h copy 2

20 August to 14 September, 2025
City Library Gallery, Melbourne

Title list for Unsettling the landscape: Planting Plan

I live in the heart of Melbourne. As a 5^th generation Australian of Irish and German descent, I wanted to better understand the history of this city and the land on which it sits, land that was never ceded by its traditional owners, the Wurundjeri people of the Eastern Kulin Nation.

An artist’s residency generously provided by the City of Melbourne in 2023 gave me the opportunity to explore the City’s Art and Cultural Collection and pursue this question. During my research, I encountered an enigmatic collection of glass lantern slides of Melbourne parks and other unknown spaces. It is believed the horticulturist, landscape architect and writer Bogue Luffman used these images in formal lectures and in his role as the Principle of Burnley Agricultural College.

While the precise narrative attending the Luffman slides has been lost, the slides nonetheless confirm and extend the aesthetic aspirations of earlier colonisers to shape the land to make it familiar and homely.

Unsettling the landscape reflects on how settler-coloniser attitudes towards the pre-contact landscape helped legitimise the dispossession of Aboriginal land. Perceiving pre-contact landscape as an unhomely wasteland, settler-colonisers rapidly converted the area around the Birrarung or Yarra River into a facsimile of their home country.

This exhibition of prints reframes the Bogue Luffman slides of European style parks, by visually fracturing the images and layering them over early maps and historical documents. The language and archival documents provide an insight into the coloniser mindset and combined with the manipulated slides suggest an unsettled and haunted terrain.

Unsettling the landscape invites an engagement with the city’s overlooked and unresolved histories. First Nation Peoples should not bear the full burden of interrogating our past. Descendants of the settler-colonisers also have a role in questioning how the land they inhabit was taken and reshaped.

I hope this exhibition contributes to the essential work of truth telling and prompts residents and visitors to the library to consider the history of the unceded lands on which we live and work.

This exhibition is located on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country.

Making Strange

Making Strange is a snapshot of images captured when the selfie function on a mobile phone is turned away from the self and is directed at the world around us.

The familiar becomes strange, when this popular and often narcissistic mode of photography is upended, and draws attention to the overlooked qualities of things and places and relationship between them.

Bypassing two photographic brags, the high-tech, architectural hero shot devoid of people, and the low fi selfie that puts humans and places at the centre, this exhibition defamiliarises the built environment.

Ignoring big technologies, drone shots and conventions such as scale, dimensionality, perspective and context, these images of interior and exterior spaces, and the details of surfaces aim to slow things down.

Making Strange invites an engagement with these structures and their material qualities as they are perceived by the selfie-lens, and not as they are known.

Five Walls Project Space, April 2024

Recent Projects & Exhibitions

Unsettling the Landscape: Planting Plan City Library 2025

Domestic Study at Linden Project Space 2019

Waiting published by M.33 Melbourne 2016

Material Fix: Pipemakers Park

Material Fix repairs, rather than replicates or restores, the broken bench seating around the concrete picnic tables made by the workers from the now defunct Hume pipe company. Instead crystal clear round resin forms have been installed on the concrete stands.

Making use of the visual and conceptual impact of contrasting materials, the translucent discs appear to suck in and reflect the surrounding park. Material Fix draws attention to the park’s industrial past and serves as a spectral reminder of the workers who made and enjoyed regular picnics after work.

Hidden Life: Last Days

Last Days captured the hidden life of objects and the places they inhabit in the final days of Brooklyn Art Hotel. Part home, part hotel for many who have visited Melbourne since 2006, this series of photos asked the question — if an object could take a selfie what would it look like? Shot on a mobile phone these images are a last farewell and bring into view the overlooked relationships between spaces and things before Brooklyn is emptied and handed over to a new owner.

Last Days was part of an art event Supernaculum: to the last drop, curated by Aphrodite Feros-Fooke and Tom Shepherd-Barron, March 2020.

Hidden Life: A Domestic study

Hidden Life, A Domestic Study turns the selfie function on a mobile phone away from the self in order to see what it can reveal about the world of objects and the spaces they inhabit. The familiar becomes strange when this popular and generally narcissistic mode of photography is subverted. Shot from below, the photographs defamiliarize the ordinary and draw attention to the overlooked relationship between things and the places they inhabit.

The images in this exhibition centre on the domestic environment and were mainly shot in the artists’ home. They form part of a larger Hidden Life series, which also draws on house museums and commercial spaces. This body of work — like all of Julie Shiels’ photographic and sculptural projects — encourages us to look more carefully at the world around us — especially the things that are hidden in plain sight.

Linden New Art -October 3, 2019 – November 3, 2019

Empty

Exhibition and photo book

Empty is a collection of photographs taken from Shiels’ home on the 20th floor in Melbourne’s CBD. The works capture the stillness and other worldliness of these workplaces when the humans have left the room. The absence of human presence amplifies activities occurring behind the glass facades, turning the focus onto the furniture, tools, technology and personal paraphernalia that populate these spaces. Inviting a reflection on the unseen spaces in a city, Empty seeks to remind us that things continue to exist even when they slip from view.

Atrium Gallery: Sofitel Hotel, Melbourne. December 2018 – February 2019

The photo book Empty, was published by M.33, Melbourne. Essay by Julie Ewington.