Out of the cradle endlessly rocking
Out of the mocking-bird's throat, the musical shuttle … Walt Witman
I want my drawing to be about moving within land. As I move my paper against and within the burnt trees, I am part of the physical structure of it, and also within the dimension of the sound of it. I have been intrigued by how often my drawings do in fact have the appearance of musical notations. The black lines and rhythmic dots made by hitting and dragging the paper against re-bounding twigs and branches often look like a musical score.
I began to realize that some of these marks have a correspondence with sonagrams or graphic representations of bird song. Not just any bird song but that of the Gilbert's Whistler or the Hooded Robin which were singing in the very trees I was moving through. It was as if the song and the carbon marks of those trees were both an expression of the energy fields of that particular habitat. Sonagrams are now made by passing the sound of the song through a computer program. And they are a graph of the two most important variables of sound: harmonic frequency and the passage of time. They are able to depict the timbre of a bird's song in a more visual way than traditional musical notations.
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 Eight sheets, carbonised wood, watercolour on paper, music stands. |
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Birdsongs of Central Australia Carbonised wood, watercolour, pencil on paper 12 in separate frames. |
