At some point in 2005 I visited John Wolesley at his studio in Saint Kilda, Melbourne. He told me that, as an artist, I should be about ‘one’ thing. I felt that as a painter I could do this but, owing to my frenetic nature as a cross media artist, I could not. However, on my residencies which were confirmed for 2006, I really wanted to develop a new style which would not exhaust itself. I wanted to find a mode of expression that I could continue to explore on all my residencies. John also told me to write down, in just a couple of sentences, what I was about or wanted to be about as an artist. I wrote down the following “I make art about the ecology, geology and evolution of environments and the human condition within the environment. I overlap the macrocosms and microcosms of landscape as they have altered through time”. At that stage of course I did no such thing and my digital landscape aesthetic was rather Victorian. However, having a series of residencies lined up for 2006 and a goal written down, I could now pursue my vision in earnest.
When I stepped off the plane into the landscape of Broken Hill I still had no visualization of the aesthetic which I had come here to discover. Two weeks passed and then I undertook the methodology which I had proposed in my application for my residency (please refer to link Broken Hill Project Proposal). The application read a little like something that had been written by a field naturalist, (I’d worked like this once before in the Green Mountains in 2003 and although the experience was profound and I had continued to make work about it for many years (please refer to link Lamington NP Qld), I had not found what I was looking for in terms of the rearrangement of space which, I imagined, would act as a porthole to a higher understanding of landscape in some broader sense.
So here I was half way through my first residency. To maintain focus I’d stuck up my artist statement next to my computer. I sensed I was moving towards something - I was overlapping botanical studies with altered photos of the landscape but the rearrangement of space plagued me. I needed to free my mind as I had when painting “590 Million Years on a Flat Surface” which I had completed in 2003. Late one afternoon I did something different. I’d been reading the Geology of Australia by David Johnson. The map of the Tasman line, which Broken Hill almost sits on, fascinated me. So I scanned it. Then I overlapped it with some botanical drawings and foot prints of a theropod from Winton. In my homosapien’s mind I walked through the doors of perception, spacial dissemination had been achieved. I placed this aesthetic in the top left corner of a work which I had been developing for submission in the Broken Hill Outback Art Prize. I was shortlisted and the work which I titled “If So Then How?” was purchased by a man who was on the city council and who, I later found out had been influential in me being awarded the residency. In this work the pivotal difference between the top left corner and the rest of the work is evident.
And now for the new dawn of spacial arrangement on the picture plain; now I could confidently say that “I make art about the ecology, geology and evolution of environments and the human condition within environment. I overlap the macrocosms and microcosms of landscape as they have changed through time”. Now for another stage in the most important lesson of all. That lesson is how to think.
