Susan Hiller Homepage

When I was in Australia, I visited Coober Pedy and bought this postcard showing a local living room. Coober Pedy is an opal-mining settlement in one of the most inhospitable regions of the Australian outback. The Coober Pedy postcard included something very familiar to me, a seascape shown over the sideboard. There was something poignant about these waves hundreds of miles from any ocean. This particular kind of mass-produced seascape exists in England only as miniatures on old postcards. The combination of symbols in the Coober Pedy postcard - desert, cave, and sea - led me to muse on deeper psychological issues, while the two sorts of 'art' - decor and reproduction - suggested other kinds of intriguing relationships. Finally, 'it made sense' to bring this postcard home to England and paint studies which return the image to some kind of 'original' state, completing the cycle.
Susan Hiller, 1983.