On Drawing

To have a dialogue with the land I use the process of drawing to record the marks, indexes and traces of the land and myself as we meet in differing conditions.  I use the materials of drawing, such as the paper, the charcoal and the ink to be sensitive and responsive to the environment they are worked in.  

I am interested in the idea that place has an active effect on people and civilizations.  Settler Australians are still a young community in this land.  Perhaps the land will begin to have an influence on the way we live.  Paul Carter suggests

For restoration of the ground does not mean treading it down more firmly or replacing it; it means replacing it for movement – in the same way that metre or speech pattern releases language for movement.[i]

In a similar sense I aim to engage with the ground through process to see if it can be moved and become active. I am working with the notion that the Land bear traces of events and people that have crossed over it.  The drawing medium reveals these traces at a ground level.  I aim to play on the common knowledge of the human condition of mortality and that we will end up as matter back in the earth. Our cells will mingle with the trees as we go through a continuous cycle of life and death, as our atoms are transformed continuously in patterns that fleetingly pass into our subconscious.

---

[i] P 5 Carter, P.            The Lie of the Land, Faber & Faber, London, 1996

 

Gundaroo Common

Gundaroo Common is a 200-acre block of land gazetted in 1870 under English law as a site for the villagers to keep cattle and camels on.  It is a living remnant of an ancient way of life.  I am interested in the possibility of how an ancient law can be re-animated on a small parcel of land to regain rights and obligations that were once a form of living.  ‘To common’ is a medieval English law that confirmed the rights of the people to make use of the forests and the rivers to meet basic economic needs in common with other people.  In Australia we live in a contested land that is being destroyed through misuse and yet we do not seriously listen to the traditional owners.  ‘To common’ offers a solution to how we may allow difference to occupy the same place and negotiate a new way of being in the land.

In Australia a major shift in the art world occurred through the Indigenous art movement. The art of Indigenous Australians revealed a different way of looking at the land we live in.  Indigenous ancestors animate the land and the history of people and place are continuously interwoven.  The art making processes and materials reveal a particular way of occupying place.  Through a law deep within English culture perhaps we can find a meeting point that is sensitive and capable of allowing different rights to co-exist.  Through a discussion of my art practice and research I will propose how a shift may occur in our thinking. My work is based on the site of Gundaroo Common but responds to propositions seen in Indigenous Australian artworks.  A dialogue is proposed to see if differing traditions can meet in the same place and negotiate an imaginative, ethical and unscripted form of life; a future that we could imagine in common with one another.