Traces and Erasures

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Traces and Erasures continues the dialogue with Gundaroo Common exploring the subtle shifts and glimpses of past and present revealed by the land.  The paper gradually accrues a history of events and begins to make connections between people and place.  The presence of the rhizomes below the paper start to dominate and energize the work, breaking the ground and making it fertile.
The series of works explore the possibility of an inspirited site. The pre-historian John Mulvaney suggests that the concept of an inspirited landscape may be one of the greatest gifts that indigenous people have given to civilization. It is important for settler and migrant Australians to find their way in the land, to find a spiritual connection to the land and accept the rights and responsibilities that go with that.
During the process of drawing the world becomes unstable, it is in the process of flux, particles change states from water to solid, solid to gas, ground to image, breath to mark. There is a constant shifting ground as I search for a new way to live in this land.  By rubbing the land and caressing it with my fingertips I immerse myself in the environment, searching with my body what the land can reveal to me.  I am going below the horizon, challenging the vertical, objective view offered by Landscapes.  The Land is not secure, I feel nausea and anxiety about my place in the world so I sit and learn by immersing myself in the land, both physically and metaphorically.  By having finger marks and dirt I aim to get the viewer back in to the soil, to remember its feel, smell, texture and what it is like to play with it. I want the work to be its own reality, the event is happening now at the time of viewing.  The artist, the work and the viewer are for a few moments linked in an event, a relationship in which we are all linked to the country.  The multivalent shape-shifting marks link us body and spirit to the Land.  

Emergence

In the far back corner of Gundaroo Common is a stand of remnant forest.  In the shadows of these trees a mark is made, the shadow responds and the dance begins.   The tree becomes a matrix and helps to develop forms and images.  The paper becomes a membrane over the ground, responding to the pressures from above and below.  Events and people leave traces on the land and the paper reveals and erases glimpses of the past and a possible future.  The play between black and white, mark and surface, figure and ground becomes a source of revelation. 

These are the first works in an ongoing series with a working title of 80 x 80's.  They started as full sheets of Arches paper (120 x 80 cm) that I regularly took out on to Gundaroo Common.  The paper would be soaked in a dam and drawn on with Sumi ink, often following the shadows on the land and being influenced by the structure of the land below. 
As the paper was repeatedly taken back to the common over time, it would accrue the detritus of the common, along with dirt, charcoal and cow manure.  Eventually I tore the paper down to 80 x 80 cm with the remnant becoming another series titled 40 x 40.  I was addressing the constant landscape / portrait reading that occurs with the rectangular format of paper.  It was important that the drawings can be worked on from every angle on the ground.  The paper was taken back in to the studio and erased and worked on some more.  For the Emergence series the works were considered finished when they acquired a smell of burnt ashes and an active shifting surface.  My aim was to show the ground as an active force in our lives.  Whilst I had hoped for a positive engagement with the land, the overall sense of the works was one of grieving and loss.  The works contain traces of events from colonization to the present day and convey the losses that have occurred during that period.

Phonemes

Phonemes are a series of small drawings, 20 x 20cm in sumi ink, charcoal and Gundaroo dirt on Rives BFK.  In linguistics a phoneme is the smallest distinctive unit of sound and in sign language it refers to the “basic elements of gesture and location”. I was attempting to devise a visual language around a linguistic system.  The drawings were useful to me in developing marks and processes that were suitable for my investigation but I found myself struggling with the language metaphor.  The more I looked into how language was structured, the more I found how culturally specific it was and how it seemed to operate quite differently from the visual arts.  The further I worked on the drawings in the land I realised I was actually trying to break down the signs and symbols which structured my thought processes.  Rather than building a new language I needed a new way of thinking.  The metaphor of language broke down for my research and I searched for another way of thinking about the visual arts that would be more appropriate for a cross-cultural dialogue.  These were important works to an ongoing series of works that continuously morph over the years but are broken down into paper sizes, 80 x 80 cm and 40 x 40 cm.  They are continuously worked on 'in situ' and back in the studio until they become 'active'.