Deep Heritage is inspired by the work of 80 year old local geologist, Norman Harrison, who meticulously catalogues various rock found in Perth’s heritage buildings, dating and tracing them back to their origins. Perth city as we know it was almost built yesterday, yet its walls and foundations contain ancient rock, formed over deep time.

Cassie Lynch, Rebecca Orchard, Andrew Williams and Mei Swan Lim have come together to each translate their meaning of the phrase ‘Deep Heritage’. Lynch is in the business of decentralising and disorientating the colonial perception of Noongar Country. Her writing explores the narratives of geomorphology through the lens of Noongar culture, booting her readers off the space-time continuum into the every-when of Indigenous deep time. For Orchard, ‘rocks are records’. Her work takes pressings of rocks from their landscape, thus mapping them in time, recording and expressing those layers in clay and paper. Williams, enamoured with sandstone and recognising the material in stately and polished civic buildings around Perth city – provides a counterpoint to the Western-centric ideas of heritage. Lim’s textiles trace the records of of coral fossil patterns left in Tamala Limestone, the forms printed like a scroll to be read. The exhibition enquires into our geological inheritance and wonders how geology will record us, while we learn to situate ourselves within the future fold of a rock.

Rebecca Orchard is a multi-disciplinary artist living and working on Noongar Boodja (Perth, Western Australia). Her work was selected to show in Hatched National Graduates Exhibition at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art in 2011 and has since exhibited widely in group shows in Perth and interstate. 2014 saw her first solo exhibition ‘Sometimes, it’s second nature’ at Free Range Gallery, followed by her second solo exhibition ‘Rose Vision’ at Paper Mountain in 2015. She was commissioned to make a responsive work for the exhibition ‘Object Lessons III: Pattern Recognition’ at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, alongside selections from the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art. In 2016 she was selected to participate in the inaugural PIAF Lab, a workshop for emerging artists of varying disciplines and later made a new series of work to exhibit in the PICA Salon, ‘Radical Ecologies’. 2018 saw Orchard perform in the role of ‘custodian’ for Museum of Water for Perth Festival. She is one half of the music duo Erasers, creating sounds together since 2009

Cassie Lynch is a writer, consultant and academic living in Perth. She is currently researching a creative writing PhD investigating colonial ideology and the intersection of Aboriginal cultural memory and scientific concepts of Deep Time. She is a descendant of the Noongar people and belongs to the beaches on the south coast of Western Australia. She is a student of the Noongar language, and was the artistic director of Woylie Fest, an all-Aboriginal storytelling festival based in Fremantle. She spends a lot of time thinking about the wetlands buried beneath the pavers of Perth City, and sees the ghosts of swamp banksias in skyscraper lobbies.

Andrew grew up on Ngarluma country in the Pilbara region of Western Australia to migrant parents. His early life was moulded in an archipelagic state, and he sought to connect to the mainland after high school finished. After a decade of working in different music projects around Perth, a change of trajectory was pursued in North America. What started as a romantic inquest, turned into an unofficial mentorship in heritage restoration by master craftsmen in Vancouver, British Columbia. Working on several notable projects across the continent, including a restaurant by award winning designer Joyce Wang, an appetite for design in construction had aggregated, and now Andrew has returned to Perth to gain qualifications venturing deeper in this field. This will be his first foray into expressing his passion for material in a less technical, more artistic application.

Mei Swan Lim is a practicing sound and visual artist whose work centres on the environmental, emotional and spiritual importance of place, interdisciplinary investigation and storytelling.

Her works have appeared at Proximity Festival, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Perth Festival, Lawrence Wilson and Janet Holmes á Court Gallery.

Lim makes work with her partner, Matthew Aitken. Together they’ve have collaborated on social practice projects such as Swamp Clubb (TRANSART), Walyalup Water Walk with Sharyn Egan (Perth Festival), Freeway Meditation with Katie West (Revelation Film Festival) and Land Sale (International Art Space). She is also an electronic musician who has been performing and writing under the name Mei Saraswati since 2010.