Saint Jude’s Leftovers (Your Thoughts in Lights)

The Australian artist Mikala Dwyer digs her way through the mining legacy of Vordernberg and the current detention centre to create a temporary place of pilgrimage.

Mikala Dwyer’s artistic practice is defined not only by a belief in the power of objects, but also by the conviction that there is a significant relationship of interdependence between matter and energy. While the artist has explored the mineral collection of Graz’s Natural History Museum for her contribution to the herbst exhibition at the GrazMuseum, for the piece developed for Vordernberg, “Saint Jude’s Leftovers”, she works with material found on-site – molten leftovers from a time in which mining was an active industry – thus building a bridge from the past to the present. Radwerk III (a water-wheel furnace), reminiscent of the municipality’s industrial heritage, with its solidified pig-iron remains, is both the abandoned remains of a once-glorious industry, and a monument to it. For the town’s new industry, a centre in which people awaiting forced deportation from Austria are housed, Dwyer is adapting the monument in the name of Saint Jude Thaddaeus, the patron saint of desperate and lost causes. Radwerk III will honour the relics of the mining era, while also listening to those voices that are otherwise never heard: Dwyer aims to depict messages from those people awaiting deportation – turning the Vordernberg installation into an antenna for the messages to Saint Jude.

Kuratorin / Kurator: Tessa Giblin
Künstlerin / Künstler / Gruppe: Mikala Dwyer