tracing lines - through time and space, back to place.

[Week 9 onwards, working on folio 2]

It seems that I am linking with my alternate areas of interest more closely the more I go along with this process - I have created my latest work (pics coming soon as the camera cord is found !!!) in graphite - a landscape of measurement, division and revision, demarcation - scribbled texts overlaying a place - naming owning restructuring - until the point of complete dissolution - the country recedes and all that’s left are these marks of ownership - of capture. I like it - I am integrating the science studies ANT theorist - Bruno Latours writings in Pandora’s hope – the work of the scientific western rationalist overlaying to the point of losing the point – the view. Although these are, I think interesting works, they are definitely preliminary works – intended to be developed into more later. I think that for my second folio/ series I will ditch the watercolour – or at least play it down in favour of the inks again – there is just something so freeing about working with the bleach and ink – because there is absolutely no guarantees – and much more instability makes for a stressful but forcibly generative leap into the unknown with almost every stroke.

Before I move on from acknowledging country and into my tracing the line series – I need to have a time out and a re-imagining of how I relate to space – I have three guiding questions, to meditate over and to mediate in these works:

1.    Where do I find place in spaces?

2.    What is country to me?

3.    What of the above are absolutes and what varies?

à Coming back to these questions through out the 2 weeks past… I have found that I have a strong affinity with a place that is not a physical place anymore, but was the first place I truly felt, the first space I claimed to be a part of, to hold in me and to stand within, not aside or apart from. I realised that without consciously acknowledging it, my acknowledging country series even, in fact all places I will eve draw, will reference this place, the events occurring within it and the fundamental transformations to my world and my self that extend from my interaction with and with in it, this place I lived in from the ages 5 through to 12, I called simply ‘the trees’ my mother called ‘the swamp’ and others called Dux Creek.

On new works…

Tracing the line has become more now a tracing of memory lines – in thinking over my vision of country – my relatedness or nearness, the quickstep move to my distancing and foreignness – has led me back to my first ‘place’ – a space I truly dwelt in. 

From the age of 5, I lived next to an estuary system – a wetlands that was literally to my front door – only a stand of gum trees acted to fence of the mangroves and grasses from our yard… it was in this border I played – often by myself, or with various neighborhood kids and one of my sisters – I caught my first fish here, we caught stingray too – I made mud pies and constructed humpies, we built mud-sleds and climbed high into the trees, swung on ropes from them, and climbed even deeper into the mangroves. 

Then in 1988 – the Australian nations 'bicentenary' year – a bunch of powerful corrupt developers and councilmen wanted to turn my place into a canal development. I remember I was there one day with my kelpie-dog and saw them sticking the pink streamer markers hard in the sand, I had heard rumblings from the adults about this ’new development’, weeks later large trucks came and dropped off dozers - the adults said they would stop it – my previously apolitical parents were suddenly activists – I went to town rallies and tried to understand why it was one silver haired fat old bastard could laugh at us – could tell us it was inevitable, it would be good for us (meaning him) – when so many people loved it – what about the baby sharks the yabbies – what about the cormorant I saw most afternoons after school, the wallabies and kookaburras – what about the twisted gnarled century old mangroves – what about my trees? I could not understand it – but with my mum (who is scarier than anyone else I knew) on the case I believed it might be okay – I wrote a school report on it in grade 2, on my place- I found out that their were court cases about it and it was looking unlikely that they could do it – that was until one September morning I returned home from school to a sight inconceivable – total destruction, the machinery had come in at 10 a.m., when most people are at work and school mum explained – and they had totally demolished the place – dirt trees and tiny beings had been slashed and scooped into the channels – dug out and overturned, ruts of thick tire tracks led to the newly formed mountains of debris.  

Debris – that is what they had turned my place into. It was an illegal move, people were fined – but they gambled and they were right, that with the destruction, protesters lost hope and lost focus – it took them 4 more years to initiate the first stages of construction but my place would become home to white stucco McMansions on plots surrounded by fences and retaining walls, the channels of the creek would be diverted and ordered into straight, well distanced and contained canals and the crazed fluid and majestic tangle of mangroves, eucalypt and banksias would submit to the turf and topiaries

I refused to eat that night in 1988, I refused to move in fact – All that they left were a stand of trees – all that remained familiar and ‘real’, their trunks now sunk in a scarred soft ground of ploughed dirt littered with the remains of the rest. I remember 3 of them had large pink crosses marked on their backs – I remember the streamers were gone now – soon to return though. I remember holding on hard to one of my trees, trying to get a harder hold on the ground and on my reality – The smooth cold wet trunk, the papery one, the rough and hardy, the dry and brittle, I held fast to each and at once felt both comfort and anxiety in waves - I could hardly believe my eyes, I would spend many an evening there – in my trees, just trying to see – I never quite played their again.

This series is all about the tracing of memories – of lines back to that place – of re-visions – of negotiating through memory some sense, or senses of place and country.

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submission

My work is due for assessment, submission day looms....I have to submit.

Just think about that word

submit:

–verb (used with object)

1.

to give over or yield to the power or authority of another (often used reflexively).

2.

to subject to some kind of treatment or influence.

3.

to present for the approval, consideration, or decision of another or others: to submit a plan; to submit anapplication.

4.

to state or urge with deference; suggest or propose (usually followed by a clause): I submit that full proof should be required.

–verb (used without object)

5.

to yield oneself to the power or authority of another: to submit to a conqueror.

6.

to allow oneself to be subjected to some kind of treatment:to submit to chemotherapy.

7.

to defer to another's judgment, opinion, decision, etc.: I submit to your superior judgment.

No wonder I am itching with fear inducing hives.

(Source of definition: Dictionary.com )

stories that add to my lines...

Things I am listening to and reading, hearing talked of and seeing about the place, always seem to end up having little conversations with the art I am making. So in attempt to get to the bottom of what it is I am doing here with this body of work, I think it is only appropriate for me to list these things I do so like to think about...

....ahhh - that little ditty references a lovely Foucault quote: 

 "I only write a book because I don't know exactly what to think about this thing that I so much want to think about, so that the book transforms me and transforms what I think."

          - Michel Foucault. (2000) [1980]. "Interview with Michel Foucault". In J. Faubion (ed.). Tr. Robert Hurley and others. Power The

              Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984. Volume Three. New York: New Press, pp. 239-40. 

His thinkings - my linkings...does it really follow, as the postmodernist nihilists would argue... that there is really truly nothing that has not been thought before?...

...which makes me always think of the particularity of the way I have been taught to think of time - and further to that, how it never made sense to me - how I feel a peculiar affinity to the conception of time realised in many Australian Indigenous groups - a cyclical notion rather than the Standardised Anglophile Linear Model....

....again this tangents into thoughts about education (and this is my worry in becoming a teacher) - I am still uncertain all this institutionalised education is actually good for you....

...here I want to argue with myself for a moment, I tend to do that a lot...

...so the list...


Listening:


A whole lot of ABC Radio National, or what I like to call 'the Public education channel' (I seriously believe I learnt more from "Rad. Nat" then I have at university). Musically, I am going with early Paul Kelly, Dan Sultan, Franz Lizst, Kev Carmody, and the The Herd: a rather broad variety of predominantly Australian music. Lizst is for when I am frustrated with the work I am producing for this project - it is like valium for me I think.


Reading:


Well, firstly lots and lots of articles and studies in journals, more than I would like to actually, this is due to my other studies: the themes include political science, sociological theory, science studies, educational theory and philosophy of education, anthropology, criminology (very odd discipline indeed), and art theory.


For this specific practical work I am doing though, I have touched base with a few old relics of our colonial heritage - Voss by Patrick White, The journals of James Cook by the man himself, and The Dictionary of Imaginary Places by A. Manguel & G. Guadalupi.


Watching:
The election coverage, too many current affairs programs, too much internet news.


All the time I am asking of these texts - Who is it we tell ourselves we are? - as Australians I mean, and How do we relate to this place we call Australia - how do we picture ourselves in it?


This is not in any way a quest to essentialise some notion of a singular "Australian vision" - I recognise further that these are old questions - but I do think that these are intriguing, pervasive, obsessive, seductive questions, especially in art.


In my travels through these - I revisted an old Radio National broadcast - a wonderful four part series
The Australian Landscape - A Cultural History

...I am off to listen to Part 4 now....

Pages

I am organising the blog along the following pages.

creations

- This page will allow me to upload and display or showcase my past and future works. I intend to shortly upload a series of ‘in the messy middle photos of my workspace and the construction processes.

       

Home

- This is the actual ongoing blog page, here is where I write thinking’s and linking’s and reflect on the processes undertaken in the practical tasks I am undertaking.

industry pathways

- this will act as a reservoir of information, reminders, and goals for me to pursue (or simply dream about).

tracing mentors

- this page acts as an archive of information on and critical appraisal of the artists who are significant to my art practice. Anselm Kiefer, (soon to upload more on John Wolseley and more...)

reflections

- organised into weeks this page is part stream of consciousness, part notepad, and all together the spot for me to think things through - by writing them out. Here, I reflect specifically on the lecture materials and new insights gathered at university and the influence that has on my ongoing project. 

storylines

Beginning to write...

picking a thread and pulling it - unraveling through the written -  the thoughts that never were before now.

Beginning to blog...

committing to the published word all these wanderings and wonderings - a long recorded gathering of threads that hopefully will draw the lines to my first exhibition...

This is a Research Journal that will act to record, review, reveal, (and perhaps to) garner responses -  to what bear witness to what is this prospective artists' salto mortale - fatal leap - into the unknown.

I was going to write of my intention for this journal-blog - from me - now- here, and found it so difficult... that is until I found myself 're-viewing' the very first visual art diary I ever constructed. I was 11, and the first thing I wrote in it - says all I still want to say.....

"When I am writing - I wish I could draw the picture of what it is [and] ...when I am drawing I.know... I can maybe write this too."
                                                                                  - 11-year-old-me, 1991.

Reminds me of a lovely aside I once read, from the fabulous iconoclast of Australian art theory, Donald Brook: He said something like...

 Art exists in the space between what is - can be said, the articulate-able and that which is not yet able to be known or said, the un-articulate-able.


N.B. I absolutely can not remember exactly where I found this particular idea but for a taste of his Brooks' writings see: http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2689163.htm 

I do believe that this is where all artistic journeys begin, especially if we understand art in the Foucaultian sense:

              

"What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life."
             
                                                                                               - Michel Foucault. (1991) [1984]. 'On the genealogy of ethics: An overview of work in progress'.  In Paul Rabinow, (ed.), The Foucault Reader. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, p. 350