Cover Image: Katie West, Locus Melo amphora/Baler shell (2025), digital print on fabric, 200 × 150 cm. Photo: UWA Media.

First Encounters: Artist Interventions with the VOC Shipwrecks
Featuring Diyan Achjadi, Katie West, Beatrice Glow and Paul Uhlmann
WA Shipwrecks Museum, Fremantle.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then art is worth a million stories. First Encounters: Artist Interventions with the VOC Shipwrecks utilises nuanced visual storytelling to stunning effect at the WA Shipwrecks Museum in Fremantle. Through creative responses from four artists, this exhibition brings to light silent histories within the museum’s seventeenth-century archives, taking art to places where artifacts cannot go.

History is a story often told by the victors. Items belonging to these histories; documents, paintings, and objects, regularly exclude or minimise minority voices. This is particularly true of the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) or Dutch East India Company archives at the WA Shipwrecks Museum. Though comprehensive in its representation of colonial history, particularly that of the Batavia, by its nature this collection is a limited glimpse into the past.

First Encounters remedies this by introducing creative conversations with the WA Shipwreck Museum collection. Featuring work by Canadian-Indonesian artist Diyan Achjadi, Yindjibarndi artist Katie West, American artist Beatrice Glow and Australian artist Paul Uhlmann, First Encounters reimagines the collection to champion voices previously overshadowed by colonialism, migration and inequality.

Curated by Arvi Wattel from the Design School at the University of Western Australia and Dr Carioli Souter, Head of Maritime Heritage at the Western Australia Museum, this exhibition sees each artist use their practice to interrogate the collection according to their own experience and expertise. Achjadi’s Batavia: a ship, a wall, a place, a bowl (2024 – 2025) reconceptualises the shards of Dutch pottery from the Batavia wreck through its iconography. Achjadi decorates replica bowls made from ink, paper and PVA glue with Jakartan dragons and Batavian skulls in place of traditional Batavia Ware designs, re-examining the Batavia’s history using alternate symbolism.

Locus Melo amphora/Baler shell (2025), a series of five hanging digital prints by West, is a beautiful ode to ancestral connection. The hanging prints are photographs of the Melo amphora, or Baler Shells, which West characterises as non-human witnesses to VOC interactions with the Australian shoreline. The shells sit upon luxurious pink satin cloth, presented as precious artefacts that redefine the genre of Dutch still life to recentre Indigenous histories.

Glow’s Textures of Time (2025) digital video installation features the ocean as an unspoken force within the legacy of the Batavia wreck, digitally rendering objects in the WA Shipwreck’s collection in the condition they would have been found hundreds of years after the ship’s sinking. Glow deconstructs the idea of Dutch still life by introducing the natural process of concretion on the rendered relics to reassess their power and value.

Uhlmann explores the spoken and unspoken complexities of Dutch first contact with Australia in his expansive selection of works, including Book of Wonders: Lost Journal of Francisco Pelsaert 1629. Using an array of materials such as silkscreen, woodcuts and paper lithographs, Uhlmann created an artist’s book with first-hand accounts of the Batavia story from its Captain. The juxtaposition and layering of the images and text in the artist’s book emphasises the importance of understanding that historical events are composite phenomena and should be understood as such.

First Encounters lends a more nuanced approach to the WA Shipwrecks Museum archives with the considered application of artistic expression. The exhibition is a successful experiment in allowing art to speak to different histories between the objective fact of historical objects, thereby enriching the museum’s collection that much more.

First Encounters: Artist Interventions with the VOC Shipwrecks ran from 28 November 2025 to 1 February 2026. For more information on exhibitions from the WA Shipwrecks Museum, visit: https://visit.museum.wa.gov.au