Mariners, soldiers, merchants and passengers on 17th century Dutch East India Company (VOC) ships were the first Europeans recorded to set foot on Western Australian shores. The VOC was in pursuit of the lucrative spice trade. Small quantities of cloves and nutmeg were worth a fortune in Europe. Instruments to determine longitude were inexact and ships that left Cape Town, for the East Indies, sometimes travelled too far east before turning north towards Batavia (Jakarta), and many ships were wrecked on the coast of Western Australia. 

On 25 October 1616 Dirk Hartog, captain of the Eendracht, landed in Shark Bay (an island is named after Hartog). He was in charge of locating up to 200 survivors of numerous Dutch shipwrecks. In response to 400 years since Hartog’s arrival on Western Australian shores, my ceramic tile map installation Gore traces Hartog's route across the globe, from The Netherlands to the East Indies. A gore is a piece of triangular shaped map cut to fit on a globe of the world. The northern half of Gore outlines Europe. At the equator there is a sharp twist and the southern half of Gore outlines the islands of Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia where the Dutch based their brutal spice empire. The blue outline on white references coveted blue on white ceramic ware, but my clay is only bisque fired, intentionally not robust or waterproof. The canon balls are clove-studded pommelos (a large kind of citrus).