Cross-disciplinary curation of rocks and art, neither rock art nor rocket science

Neil Frazer is an Australian artist who has exhibited extensively in Australia and New Zealand since the mid-1980s and is recognised for his large scale canvases, encompassing abstraction and figuration. A common theme in his works is coastal landscapes. A donation of several works to the Macquarie University Art Gallery provided an opportunity to match works with items selected from the university’s geology collection. After contact with the artist it was established that works were not situated geographically but were instead evocative of multiple places and the artist was seeking emotive and spiritual engagement with the landforms represented. Rock specimens were selected and interpretive text written so they would complement the nature of the landscapes represented in Frazer’s work. Text was written to explore ideas surrounding landscape formation from a geological perspective regardless of an audience’s pre-existing knowledge. The exercise shows the value of juxtaposing unlikely types of objects to promote new ways of conceptualising an understanding of the environment.