If These Walls Could Talk is an investigation of a local architectural site, the historic Q Station.

Year 9 and 11 students from Northern Beaches Secondary College, Mackellar Girls Campus, investigated a range of procedures that reveal the personal, political and cultural histories of this site.

Conceptually, the body of work is driven by ideas regarding how place is intrinsically linked to identity and memory by considering the site as a repository of history; a silent witness to events, a commentary on human habitation and/or displacement, an idiomatic ‘fly on the wall’.

In their own artmaking, these concepts are synthesised with drawing methods such as layering with tonal grounds, erasure and redrawing; intaglio printmaking methods such as collographs including embellishments with textile and fibre; and ephemeral sculptures formed organically from intricate shapes that evoke fungi or cell-like honeycomb structures akin to wasp nests.

In each of these methods, the focus is on selecting materials and methods that reinforce a visual palimpsest.

To view the exhibition, visit the Creative Library on Level 1 of Manly Library during July and August, 2023.

For further information, please email creative.library@northernbeaches.nsw.gov.au