For the first time, three interconnected bodies of photographic work in Brad Rimmer’s thought-provoking Wheatbelt trilogy will be shown together in a major exhibition at Fremantle Arts Centre. Part of Perth Festival, Loom of the Land will take over all galleries at FAC, providing a rare opportunity to immerse in imagery created over two decades, layered with recurring themes such as silence, loss, resilience, personal memory and collective community history and fragility.

Silence (2009), Nature Boy (2019) and Nowhere Near (2023) represent Rimmer’s return to the Wheatbelt region of Western Australia and the landscape of his youth. Rimmer says Silence was based on a generation of older teenagers who were around the same age as he was when he left the region in 1982 at the age of 19. “I started Silence in 2005, and by then there was a real change,” he says. “There was less and less of that demographic. Populations were declining, young people were leaving and small farms were being bought up by larger, corporate enterprises.”

Rimmer’s often haunting images also allude to the unspoken weight of what goes unsaid in small towns. “Sometimes there were locations where things might have happened,” he says. “And then there was also this kind of non-disclosure that was always happening in these small towns about things that maybe had been going on, but were always kept quiet.”

After Silence, Rimmer felt there was more to be said about his personal experiences at that age. “For Nature Boy, I wrote four short stories about when I was working, failing high school and working on the wheat bins for a year before I came to the city to go to art school,” he says. “There are portraits, but they’re not necessarily connected to the stories – they represented things within those stories,” he says.

Nowhere Near expands on scenes of regional town halls encountered in Silence and Nature Boy. Once an important centre of regional social life, town and community halls were where future parents met, indeed Rimmer’s own parents met in one, their architecture and interiors a reflection of a town’s wealth. Rimmer says for Nowhere Near he was inspired to capture the buildings, now fast disappearing from the landscape. “They’re so beautiful those halls, and I noticed there’s less and less of them because economies have changed and culture has changed the way we meet and do things, so they’re not needed anymore.”

In another first, Rimmer’s work will expand beyond the photographic in Loom of the Land. Commissioned by the Perth Festival, two composers were invited to create new works in response to the images. Singer/songwriter Emily Barker and composer Mark Holdsworth both chose a hall from Nowhere Near as their performance space, which was filmed for the exhibition, providing a unique immersive dialogue between image, place and sound. “The exhibition is an opportunity to move into something more cinematic,” says Rimmer, “using image and music together to reach a deeper emotional level.”

Nostalgia, memory and connections are wrapped into Loom of the Land in a way that reaches outside the regions and touches the ghosts of all our lives. Rimmer says people may not be from the Wheatbelt but remember their own return to a place. ‘It’s that underlying element that’s really important about how you see a place after many years,” he says. “There may be a real heaviness behind all these pictures, but people can also experience it in a way that they can see something delicate and beautiful.”

There’s no doubt that seeing the trilogy of works together for the first time in one exhibition will be an incredible experience for Rimmer.  “For me it’s going to be really beautiful just to see all the works together,” he says.

Loom of the Land is on show at Fremantle Arts Centre from 7 February until 19 April.