The Common Charter: On Drawing

The Common Charter

About the Common Charter

It is often forgotten that the law ‘to common’ is a fundamental underpinning of our laws and constitution. It is the basis of the Magna Carta, which was formed in recognition of the rights of people to make a sustainable living from the land they live on without recourse to the state. The historian Peter Linebaugh in his book, The Magna Carta Manifesto, discusses the development of this document. He states that the message of the charters that comprise the Magna Carta is clear: “political and legal rights can exist only on an economic foundation. To be free citizens we must also be equal producers and consumers.” (Linebaugh, 2008, 6) He makes a case that the charters are crucial legal documents for the protection of individual and collective rights from appropriation by the state. He promotes the idea of commoning as an active process by which the concept of the commons is continually reassessed and reapplied to the world.

Through working alongside Indigenous Australian artists in the field of Printmedia I have been shown another way of thinking and being in the world. Ancestors animate the land and the history of people and place are continuously interwoven. The imaging processes and materials reveal a particular way of occupying place.

My interest in pursuing the tradition of commoning was prompted by the site of Gundaroo Common where I walked my dog each day. I came across a system that could be inclusive of difference and sympathetic to other ways of being. It is a tradition deep within our cultural memory that can give us an imaginative, ungranted, unscripted form of life; a future that we could imagine in common with one another.

I have now moved from Gundaroo and find myself starting to draw in a new environment in the Kimberleys. Living in the town of Kununurra, I found another commons called Mirima National Park. A section of the park has been allocated as a public area for locals and tourists alike. It is here that I continue my pursuit of what it means to common.

Sunday, January 23, 2011

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

The Common Charter

The Common Line, in progress, Gundaroo Common, NSW

On Commoning