Abstract
This paper examines how my feminist, practice-led research engages with the Wallal Archive, a photographic record of the 1922 solar eclipse expedition held by the State Library of Western Australia, as a site where research and the everyday converge. During pandemic lockdowns, unable to access the material archive, my domestic space became both refuge and studio. The kitchen table served as an archive and darkroom; the search terms “laundry” or “feminism” revealed telling absences that echoed broader culture omissions.
Amid everyday debris, I developed methods that transformed institutional records into personal encounters: downloading and cataloguing images, rephotographing them with a Polaroid camera, staging them alongside domestic scenes, and manipulating them through cropping, reframing, and shifting focus. This entanglement of research and lived experience, what Dever calls “archival mess”, foregrounds the emotional and material textures so often peripheral to official histories. By centring overlooked fragments and women’s labour through tactile, analogue process, my work resists the separation between artist and art. Instead, it aligns with feminist practice that values subjectivity, domesticity and care. Ultimately, this creative approach blurs boundaries between researcher and subject, archive and home, art and life, opening the Wallal Archive to new, intimate readings that reimagine what counts as historically significant.