Bird on a Wire exhibited at the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery from 29th September to 22nd October 2006.
After ten years painting the furthest reaches of what was once the supercontinent Gondwana - from the far south of South America to the islands of the Indonesian Archipelago, John Wolseley has returned to the centre of it all - Inland Australia. Following a line of fire he has been burning himself back into the Mallee sandhills and Box Ironbark forests of N.W. Victoria .
In the Mallee, the raging fires had left skeletal trees of pure carbon – different radiating structures – each species expressing its own particular energy. Sometimes these trees themselves played a part, their blackened fingers doing the drawing; as he moved the paper with different gestures over and within them in a kind of awkward dance. During this kinetic process the twigs and branches drag, stipple and scrape with their own inimitable sound across the paper. The marks have a strangely aural quality, akin to a musical score. And he found that there was a mysterious synergy between these notations and the songs of the birds of that habitat. The harmonics of the birdsong is given graphic form as sonagrams which he melted into several of the drawings done by the trees.
The intimate centre of this exhibition is an investigation of a barely visible fence which the artist followed for miles and miles through the Sand Hills in the Wyperfeld National Park . This burnt and broken structure – often nearly erased by the wind and the sand - became for him a poignant symbol of the early settlers' relationship with that land. Continue reading...
From an account of the making of the work by John Wolseley
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The harmonic patterns of Mallee birdsong –Finch, Eagle and Bush Curlew ( 2004) |
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The poet's fence I (2004/5) |
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A history of Parrots, Drifting maps and Warming seas (2005) |
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Burnt traces - Banksia, Broombush and Grevillea (2004/5) |
