Meteorwrongs and Murder at Sea: Meet Australia's Next Generation of Artists

Every year, Australia's Primavera exhibition gives a spotlight to the country's most exciting young artists — those aged 35 or younger. This year, six artists were chosen to show their work, and they all share a big question: what happens to the people, objects, and stories that history forgets? Curator Antares Wells visited studios and galleries in every Australian state and territory to find these artists. She says many of them are drawn to archives, which are collections of old records, letters, and documents from the past.

Wells says she noticed a strong pattern while visiting so many artists around the country. 'I identified a preoccupation with what I've called traces; an interest in the relics of the past, picking them up and making something new with them,' she says. She believes this interest in history is something people have always had, but these six artists bring something fresh to it. She hopes visitors leave the exhibition feeling both moved and inspired by the work.

One of the artists, Callum McGrath, dug into a dark and surprising true story from 1942. A 19-year-old sailor named John 'Jack' Joseph Riley was stabbed and killed on an Australian navy ship called HMAS Australia II. The case also involved a secret — a queer love triangle that authorities tried to hide at the time. McGrath, who is based in Melbourne, found a key letter in the archives that had been kept out of the court case on purpose.

McGrath believes the missing letter tells us a lot about how history gets shaped by those in power. 'The fact that the letter was left out of the court hearings on the boat, I think, speaks volumes,' he says. His artwork, called History Piece, layers images and text on top of each other to show just how complicated this story really is. He made detailed portraits of the people involved by etching them onto glass using digital tools and ink.

Artist Linda Sok explores a different kind of loss in her work called Deities in Temples XXI. It brings back a traditional Cambodian art form called pidan — a type of silk weaving that was almost completely destroyed by the Khmer Rouge, a brutal group that seized power in Cambodia in 1975. The only records of many lost pidans were old index cards kept in a museum. Sok, who now lives in the United States, used those cards to reconnect with her Cambodian heritage and her family.

Sok shared the descriptions from the archive cards with her relatives and asked them to draw what each lost pidan might have looked like. The process brought her family closer together and helped bridge the distance between them. Instead of learning the traditional weaving method, which can take years to master, Sok screen-printed her family's drawings onto bundles of thread and added painted details. 'Screen-printing was my way of paying homage to the practice without actually replicating it,' she says.

One surprising moment came when her family drew a tree in the centre of one pidan, even though the official record made no mention of any tree at all. When Sok visited Cambodia, she noticed that tree imagery was very common in Buddhist art there. This made her think about how our records of the past are always incomplete and shaped by choices other people made. 'There's no way of telling what exactly the truth of the matter is, but it's an interesting question,' she says.

Perth-based artist Jack Wansbrough found a funny and touching subject for his work: 'meteorwrongs.' These are objects that people mistakenly believed were meteorites — rocks that have fallen to Earth from outer space — but turned out to be ordinary rocks or industrial waste. Wansbrough found an archive full of old letters from people who had sent in these rejected items to a museum. He used this archive to create his installation, called Meteorite Enquiries.

Wansbrough spent about six months hunting for objects that matched the descriptions in the old letters. He searched crystal shops, industrial areas, roadsides, and even a university car park to find the right pieces. He displayed the objects on a low platform alongside the original yellowing letters, under stained-glass fixtures he built himself. 'Sometimes, I was looking at photos and a piece I literally found on the ground was almost a perfect match. That was really exciting,' he says.

Even though none of the rocks are scientifically important, Wansbrough says each one carries its own human story worth sharing. Some letters gave him very little information, which actually gave him the freedom to use his own imagination. He says his work is about pointing toward something outside of himself — something you have to imagine even as you look at what is right in front of you. 'They're essentially waste, but there's still all this life and personality in them,' he says.