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.