Journal Notes

  This morning   I carried four 10m x 3m rolls of 300gsm Waterford paper to the top of a hill and cut them into four metre lengths.  I  waited as the wind started to grow, and send cloud shadows like indigo bruises coursing over the sand hills and with  unruly gusts  played with my long sheets of paper.  I felt as if I was an accomplice of the storm as it caught hold of my four metres of paper dragon and played games with it.  I would hold one end and the paper would furl and uncurl against a Hakea bush whose black twigs would inscribe it;  and then  the drawing would quiver to a pause and rest over the tree and be more gently scribbled -  only to be taken up by another gust and pulled up into the air again and shaken into the clouds.  When the wind was too angry I would release the drawing and it would soar away like a giant sea gull  and pirhouette and crash into a bush and be held there for several minutes.  The paper was then enclosing the natural form which would be inscribing its charcoal story within its paper cradle .
 
 

Like Aolius himself or some deranged magician.  I would then pull another drawing from where it was embracing another tree and follow its urges to shake and dance with another set of Mallee branches.  As I leapt about - and  exchanged one vast sheet of paper with another - I was doing a kind of dance with an almost formal rhythm of wild release followed by coercion and  a holding back; as if the gaunt burnt tree stems, the wind, and myself were engaged in an elemental tango.

Now back in my camp I look at the dense scribbling of the charcoal and think - this is about as Dyonisian as drawing can get !  I then  wonder if  these sheets of paper have become something in their own right -  a living document about that dance and  whether these  strange ideograms do really  tell  one of the stories which have emerged from those  silent Mallee tubers hidden in the sand.  I reckon they do !  And will provide a wonderful base drawing on which to add other systems and Mallee thoughts. Or remain as they are as valid documents in themselves.

Echoing these Mallee lignotubers, and their extensive network of  roots, are systems of ephemeral swamps and creeks. The surface water has invented its own complex geographies alternating times of flow, times of rest - as it dances with the aquifers and deeper water tables.   There is an ancient relationship between the waterways , creeks, billabongs and their flood plains.  I have been marvelling at the lines of energy radiating from swamps and water holes, and seasonal creeks full of bird, animal and plant life.

More than ever before I found  that this process of making a watercolour seemed to be analagous to the action and process by which water moves and forms the landscape itself.   I've been laying these huge sheets of paper on to softly descending banks of sand hills, and start in a rather wild and physical way by pouring, brushing, sploshing quantities of watercolour which I have previously mixed up in large bowls.  All these watery landscape elements around me are then recreated on the paper.  Pools in depressions in the paper overflow in slow winding rivulets and become analogues of what hydrologists call ' chain of ponds systems.'
 
 
These dry over several hours and there appear spidery  reticulations -  the watermarks leaving  the contours left by the slowly evaporating liquid.  As the sun dries the pools of colour the  pigment in suspension thickens and sometimes cakes and cracks -  for all the world like the way mud does on a dry waterhole.  This last October up there by the dried out Sunset Tank - other forces conspired to make these drawings share the same experiences as the land they rested on.  As the watercolour dried hordes of ants, mud-daubing wasps and hundreds of very thirsty European bees rested on the edge of the drying pools of colour; their little jaws etching away at the already crinkly lines of reticulated pigment.   And one evening after a shower mists of flying ants crowded round the waterholes.  I went to my swag thinking that in the morning their diaphanous wings would have added other ghostly marks to the watercolour, and on rising I found that wingless ants  had eaten the bodies of the flying ones whose wings had floated away in the wind.  Other actions of your traditional water-colourist also contributed to the finished work in an exagerated way.  The washes, the wet on wet, the splashing and sploshing of gestural brush, seemed to contribute move aerial and atmospheric elements  which melded into the more earthly physical and drier traces of rivers and ponds and billabongs.  At  times it was difficult to tell whether one was looking at liquid processes on the earths surface, or mountains in the sky.  One night a  heavy downpour made new pools on the nearly dried paper, and I woke to find new chains of ponds; and little  seas covered with debris.  Leaves and moths when  dry left their imprint of tannin and wingscales on the paper flood plains.

The contrast between the country which still retains some tree cover and its natural patterns of water flow; and the greater areas which have been cleared, filled in and drained has become more and more extreme over the years - conditions exacerbated  by drought and climate change.  When painting in those areas it is only on the paper that I have my billabongs and waterholes.  On the land itself there is often only dust and salt.  There is not much there to draw - but there are always the FENCES.
 
 
I am still not quite sure what is behind my current obsession with  boundary lines and the handwriting of culture called 'Fence'.  In 2005 I travelled the length of the Victorian/South Australian border fence to try and knock this overburdening obsession on the head.  I set up camp in an area of ground which because of old surveyors inaccuracies belonged to no one and no state or territory.  A lost no-man's land,  and there I felt a strange sense of release.  Just the place I thought to break free from previous states of being - to make some creative leaps, or even start a new art movement.  I started a series of drawings in which I played with the idea  of FENCE and GATE.    In the work  'Camel Gate: Boundary Track: SA/Vic ' - I was looking across the boundary fence, through a gate into another world. Over a period of a week something strange happened to my axis of vision.  I started to see into the nature of the landscape beyond and it  became somehow miraculous.  I thought - here is a forgotten landscape with its own 'being' existing quite separate from cultural landscape stereotypes.   I felt like I was being an explorer,  but in this case not in a newly discovered country but here at my own gate.

I found something else whilst playing with this trope of fence.    I wrote earlier about how the workings of the watercolour medium seem to mimic the dynamic of  living Mallee ecosystems.  I found that when I moved my linear fence constructs into this fluvial  moist field of action - pinned it down, fenced it in; then the whole picture plane really did start to look and feel like the actual  landscape.  And the imposition of a kind of linear thinking - the enclosing stitches of fence suggested that, as with the physical liquid evolution of the land surface, I was again subjecting my picture plane to a further  process - that radical alteration to wilderness  which comes when it is fenced and enclosed.    Sometimes as I start to dig my fence post in - as the straight lines move across the page - I feel that I am atavistically replaying that moment when some ancestor first fenced in the corn, or herds of animals.  When I dig these posts in  it is almost as if I am impaling a hidden nerve.  A nerve or conduit which goes back to Cain and Abel -  to that shift from the nomadic to the settled.  From which evolved  the Enlightenment and  those leaps of linear thinking and technological achievement - that crucial shift in the life of our species which finally has  led  to our contemporary state of separation and alienation - .and probable final degradation.  There are times however when I see the idea of fences  in a more positive light.  Maybe this nostalgia for that Eden beyond the Gate is misplaced.  Maybe one approach to finding new ways of relating  to the World again is to accept our rational selves- our linear thinking - ,  and use these logical fencings to FENCE IN certain  spaces and dimensions.  And once inside to learn how to relate our cerebral thinking to our more instinctive selves.  A bit like fencing in the wilderness to protect it from the outside.   A bit like an allegory of the relationship between Science and Art.  Then we may appreciate and need fences because then at least we may be able to conserve the wilderness within us and then perhaps wilderness outside us.