This page is dedicated to the procedural in art.
I myself wish at times - with some artists - for it to be possible for me to glimpse
just for a moment
their world and wanderings.
This approach also frames my series well - tracing the lines.
I suppose it is a commonly felt sentiment too - considering the popularity and increasing occurrence of 'artists tours' and 'artists worlds' types of publications and events.
Well, here is a brief glimpse into mine.
There are four main spaces within which I work - my veranda (as above) - out in the wilderness, under my house and out at Alligator Creek.
I enjoy working on multiple works at once as I am impatient with having to cease work for the extended periods required for drying between layers when working with ink and watercolours.
I love trying new techniques and often use found materials as told for mark-making - be that a dried length of bamboo or a plastic comb, a crochet hook or a feather - all tend to speak their own path into existence in the process of forming lines
Comfortable with extended periods of solitude I do not however like anything more than working alongside others - be that Kim (a fellow artist and friend who shares her space out at Alligator Creek with me) or my children. Indeed, these times spent with my daughters are golden - a time to truly speak and share - and I must say they are quite the critics.
On Alligator Creek
Long hikes through the scrub, with the reward of a cool rock pool dip at the end are not only my main form of exercise - both physical and mental.
These walks are about getting to know a new place - over time and through time spent.
Taking the same trail is impossible, each time we travel we are on a shifted ground - life has been happening along and has ensured shifts - both savage (like a brush fire, or a washed out creek bend) and subtle (a new web or nest in construction, even leaves shifted on the wind).
< I have discovered a real joy in collecting the ocher and fashioning handmade pastels here also
It is in becoming familiar in this space that I have been realising a closer more nuanced connection to my place of contemplation in this series - in walking these paths I am tracing lines back to there - back through me.
Though I do find ink offers a strong medium for expressing the humid, wet, thick yet fluid quality of Australian (Queensland) atmospherics. The turn of day to dusk, the fall of dawn to day (which were my favourite times back then as a child and remain so) are particularly well rendered in this way.
Working with ink and bleach is like alchemy, the addition of one to the other is so precise and requires much experimentation - with effects being often impossible to predict and harder still to replicate.
For example - that it creates completely different effects if one is to add solid in to watered down bleach then it does to add watered ink to solid bleach makes sense, but what of the fact that to mix ink and bleach - let sit to finish its mutation - then add the water - is different again. then after all this, the mix will dry on the paper to a completely different colour - but at different rates, sometimes changing for weeks after. I love this mad scientist part of my work practice.
In my latter two works, I have returned to making with ochre and charcoal has offered a different approach and demonstrates fully the shift in approach to my tracing lines - I am feeling much lighter and more familiar with this place I have tracked through my works - I am there again and again in my mind now:
I realise the closeness of these travels in the world through places with the travels into self - through and with and to self.
No longer a world out there - but a world within - a dwelling.
Each new work full of the opportunity of becoming.
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay. - Robert Frost
