An Unsolved Study (based on photographs from Wanda Beach Jan 12, 1965)

Elvis RICHARDSON

Void_Melbourne

03 May - 01 June 2024

On a windy Monday afternoon, a few days after I was born in January 1965, the double murder of two fifteen-year-old neighbours and friends Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock occurred in the sand dunes of Sydney’s Wanda Beach.

Less than a dozen media photographs surrounding the case circulated at the time, and they have been reproduced in every book and anniversary news story since, black and white, blurry, grainy photos that have obsessed me following my first encounter with them in a library book titled Unsolved Crimes of Violence in Australia borrowed when I was eleven.

The body language of the policemen in their suits and ties presiding above the young women’s bodies buried in the sand, gather with a resigned knowing, heads bowed and eyes searching.  Grainy faces cropped from family photographs stare in disbelief alongside the search party of maps, timelines, identikits and witnesses assembled to record their stories to urgent reporters with clasped hands scripting our collective memories.

The same stretch of beach is the setting of the 1979 novel Puberty Blues, a coming of age story of two teenage girls surviving the everyday misogyny and violence of surf culture.  As a teenager I spent an endless summer with my recently divorced mother cloistered on the other side of Port Hacking in Bundeena. My daily horizon was occupied by the distant line of bright sand dunes of Wanda Beach, the steelworks of Kurnell behind, under the flight path of planes transiting Kingsford Smith airport. I dreamed of taking flight but was fearful, warned of what lay in-between.

The figures and scenes from these harbored images are revisited and re-examined, monumentalized in miniature in this series of ceramics studies. An Unsolved Study reconfigures the accustomed compositions of family snapshots taken before the event and reconstructs the shock and solemnity depicted in the photographs and news footage taken after the event.