Janine Combes’s practice revolves around the meaning imbued within a place and the objects attached to it. Exploring these ideas and how they translate into the experience of belonging, Combes has used her background as a jewellery maker to create a new body of work inspired by abandoned towns once marked for settlement in Tasmania.

“I am interested in materials as well as their stories,” says Combes. “My interest grew from the idea of using these towns as a poetic vantage point from which to view contemporary relationships to place, what we know and what we do not know of their pasts, and how these stories are connected to my history as a fifth-generation Tasmanian of both free settler and convict heritage.”

Much of Combes’s source material comes from objects gifted to her, found in op shops or abandoned in specific locations. Fragments of household items, old coins, wooden boats and metal buttons still speak to their history and former purpose, despite having been cut, heated and transformed by hand into something new. Along with texture, a defining feature of her work is a technique Combes calls ‘words with soft edges.’ Often inscribed into her metal surfaces is text that flows over the edges. “I’m riffing on the idea that people like the suffragettes used coins like an early form of social media,” she explains. “They engraved words into their coins and circulated them into the population.”

Coombes also repurposes antique furniture she has painted black as plinths. In the gallery, the artist arranges her objects as though they are tumbling off the edges like scattered findings from an archeological dig, while others hang from the ceiling and are twined with barbed wire. As she puts it, “For me, learning to belong involves knowing the stories of place, acknowledging and learning how to fit with our history, and living in a way which is less exploitative and more connected to the environment.”

Paper towns and abandoned places
Janine Combes
Plimsoll Gallery
On now—8 December

This article was originally published in the November/December print issue of Art Guide Australia.