Paving the Way by Iesha Wyatt
In 2022, the City commissioned Artist Iesha Wyatt, a local resident, to create an artwork for the Stretch Reconciliation Action Plan to acknowledge key Indigenous sites and to connect communities.
Iesha Wyatt is an emerging Yued Noongar artist working in both painting and digital mediums, with a background in fine art and graphic design.
Iesha started with a map, marking points of significance, roads and the river, but it was only when she removed the hard borders of the map that the piece came to life. She found that the work began to grow around the idea that the roads currently showing on our maps actually follow traditional paths, laid out for thousands of years. These paths not only connect important places but they pull together the past with the present and form a link that will continue long into the future.
The name of the artwork
Paving The Way honours those who go ahead, making it easy for others to follow and references the tracks of the Wagyl as it forms the bends of the river. Most importantly, it explicitly acknowledges that bitumen and asphalt have been laid upon paths made by human feet.
Iesha often chooses to work with digital tools to make her art. She finds the nature of the technology, which allows her to constantly update and change her images, colours and layers, mimics the way maps are always changing and being brought into the present. While a digital image can be constantly changed and manipulated, the evolutionary process that created it remains forever in the process recording data which documents every decision made. giving the work great depth and meaning.
Artwork:
Paving The Way (2022) by Iesha Wyatt