Mitchel Cumming and Kenzee Patterson: A redistribution
⬤ Verge Gallery 16 Feb - 31 Mar 2023
Weighing down the floor of Verge Gallery at the University of Sydney are two massive stone discs. Pocked and tarnished with age, they crouch low to the ground on unglamorous metal pallets, the sides smooth and the top worked into a system of furrows that move outwards from a hole in the middle.
The stones are, in fact, nineteenth century basalt millstones, and they form the aesthetic and conceptual centrepieces for Mitchel Cumming and Kenzee Patterson’s collaborative exhibition, A redistribution (2023). As the show’s room-sheet explains, the millstones were used between 1812 and 1830 at a flour-mill established by the settler Thomas West on Gadigal Country in the area now known as Paddington, and are currently on loan from Sydney’s Museum of Applied Arts and Science (the Powerhouse).
The millstones entered the Powerhouse’s collection in 1906 and, it seems, have rarely left storage since. This is perhaps unsurprising—they are unbeautiful, unwieldy things. Getting them to Verge was no easy matter. As the exhibition text details, it took a year of careful correspondence and paperwork, and a team of engineers, conservators and administrators to measure and document Verge’s humidity and air quality, dimensions, and weight bearing capacity. It is because of this latter capacity that the two stones (which in use would have been placed one on top of the other) are spaced apart—the show’s first and most obvious act of redistribution.
Nick Croggon is an art historian, writer and editor based on Gadigal and Wangal land. He is Events and Programs Officer at the Power Institute, and is completing a PhD at Columbia University, New York.
