Bundanon

Dolla Merrillees is a writer, curator, cultural producer and author of The Woodcutter’s Wife: A Stepmother’s Tale (Halstead Press, 2007). 

She brings a wealth of national and international experience to her work having had senior roles in large scale festivals, museums, cultural spaces as well as the tertiary sector.  Merrillees is currently the Director Western Sydney Creative, Western Sydney University and was previously the Director and CEO of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney and the Associate Director, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation.  Merrillees is a global emissary for the Sherman Centre for Culture and Ideas and has worked with leading fashion designers, cultural practitioners, and architects.  She is a member of the Sydney Review of Books Advisory Board and the FORM Dance Projects Board. Merrillees is listed in Who’s Who of Australian Women and in 2018 she was awarded an Australian Design Honour by the Australian Design Centre.   

In Residence at Bundanon

UnLocated is my personal journey in search of lost objects and objects that have lost their stories.  Objects accessioned in perpetuity into museum and gallery collections or held in private collections.  Millions upon millions of things, small and large, rare and fragile, broken, revered, ordinary and precious.  Secreted away in storerooms, concealed in cabinets and drawers, languishing on racks and shelves, and locked in archaic vaults.  Some are rarely, if ever, seen while others lie still and half forgotten, a lingering memory, or a tantalising hollow space on an empty shelf.  Sometimes faint traces might endure, a handwritten note in a museum stock book or their absence recorded in a blunt typed database entry as being ‘unlocated’, the provenance ‘unknown’.  Using a creative mix of object biographies, provenance research, life writing and memoir the proposed work will stitch together a series of vignettes to engage with the multilayered history and untold stories represented by these objects.