Georgie Mattingley examines how darker realties are tolerated through highly controlled images. Upon migrating from Naarm to Mparntwe, she attended a dinner party with a Pine Gap employee. The first question she asked: “Are there any artworks in the base?”

Pine Gap is an intelligence site, co-owned by the Australian Federal Government and the United States, 18km from Mparntwe. Movement through is highly controlled and operations are classified. Mattingley explains, “It plays a pivotal role in Western-led activities of war.” In the 1980s it came to light that the site was less focused on cosmological surveillance as its previous title, Joint Defence Space Research Facility, implied. It’s been a site of activism since.

Through her website, Mattingley collects employees’ descriptions of the artworks inside the base. She notes, “Those who have an interest in the arts are more willing to participate.” AI is used to produce reference images from the descriptions, which are then transformed into paintings. AI often refuses to acknowledge real aspects of the base—a signifier of the software potentially being used to conceal truths. Mattingley explains, “The artworks are dead. Like art in hospitals or prisons—kitsch and nostalgic and chosen to uplift. This is how art functions in these institutions that hold, or distract from, the horrors of humanity.”

Mattingley will present the paintings, a video work, and a sound score by Zoë Barry. The score will create “an emotional, subterranean element”, showing the complexity of what at first glance appear as trivial images. Further colonial violence arises through the description of Aboriginal artworks: sovereign works displayed on stolen land, under Western surveillance and control.

Mattingley is serious about protecting the employment and reputation of the interviewees, keeping conversations secure. This is one iteration of an ongoing social project. In Mattingley’s words, “Here is the project and it’s not going away.”

Georgie Mattingley: Project Pine Gap
Watch this Space
11 October—16 November

This article was originally published in the September/October 2025 print edition of Art Guide Australia.