The Broken Line exhibition Darwin

The Broken Line was a dialogue with Mirima National Park situated on the edge of Kununurra.  I lived near here for 6 months and gradually began to learn about the natural and cultural environment. The paper works were brought to the NCCA gallery in Darwin and were responded to in the gallery.

I aim to challenge the European landscape tradition of figure on ground and propose a new viewpoint of ground on ground.  I use the paper, which is normally seen as a ground, to become a line in the environment.  This line becomes covered in the ground of the site, acting as a membrane to record the events of my visit and the contours of the ground below.  This ground is washed, ironed, folded and mended as I use my cultural language of care on the work.

The ground is taken into the gallery and placed on the ground of the gallery wall.  There is a constant shift between what is the ground and where the viewer situates themselves.  Like the ashes we will eventually become, the charcoal and ochre drawings shift between being under the ground or as a record of our presence over the ground.

The Broken Line in progress NCCA Darwin

I arrived in Darwin with a sequence of works on paper developed in situ in the Kimberley, WA. The space in the gallery that I occupied was normally used for inter-disciplinary exhibitions, often involving projections.  This lent itself to a sense of enclosure that became very suggestive of both natural and cultural environments as I drew on the walls.

My initial idea was to draw across the walls and the paper integrating the two surfaces, however as I lay out the paper works, they floated quite beautifully in the space and I could not imagine drawing over them.  

Instead, I outlined the paper on the side walls of the gallery to suggest they had been peeled off these surfaces. I drew with ink and pigments over the walls until they achieved a saturation equal to the drawings.  

At the end I peeled away the masking tape revealing the process of the drawing.  This opened up an exciting new mark and perspective to the work.  

This was a totally new and unexpected development of my practice that I aim to pursue in further works. There were strong references to caves and rock walls due to my use of natural pigments but this was counterpoised through my use of the masking tape to reference the drawings on paper that were hung on another wall.  

These lines added architectural references that allowed the walls to appear as frescoes or church walls similar to those found in Europe.  I was pleased with this cross-cultural referencing between Indigenous Australian experience and my training in Western Art traditions.

Becoming Memory

The drawings were torn into pieces, packed and transported to my new home in Hobart.  The paper holds the traces of my drawing processes and also of ancient events.  My time in the Kimberley and at Mirima National Park becomes a memory.  I had thought the rough sandstone ochres would be strange in this new environment but there are very similar ochres in the hills around Hobart.  The sedimentary layers of what was once a sea bed, forced to the surface, eroded and blown to a new site has once again gone through a major upheaval.  The paper becomes loose leaf pages with a memory of materials and events.

Broken Line (in progress) TCotA Hobart

Broken Line (in progress) TCotA Hobart