About Process

Ground on ground, staining, rubbing, washing, printing, wiping, rinsing, ironing. These are the processes of my training and my inclination. They are continuously used and adapted in a dialogue with the land. Place and placelessness shift and slide as I deal with colonisation and dispossession. The land holds the traces of the past, glimpses are given, knowledge is gained and the dialogue continues. The archaeologist John Mulvaney once said that an inspirited landscape was one of the greatest gifts given to us by Indigenous people. My work aims to find a ground where this is respected across all cultures who share the land.

Drawing process

Drawing process
Membrane of Memory, Truganini Track, Mt Nelson, Tasmania

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Slippages

The rocks in Mirima are continuously moving and changing.  What at first appeared to be a spectacular land formation reveals itself to be a land in flux.  There are large 'wounds' on the walls of the formations where rocks slides have occurred and as I walk the tracks I can see the rocks on the paths become broken and gradually reduced to sand.  The cycle of formation and disintegration seems far too rapid in country that is so ancient.

I have started doing ochre drawings about the slippages in the land and the feeling that the rocks could slide around underneath my feet.  Rather than producing work about the formation of country I am interested in formlessness and entropy.  As I draw I want to challenge the tradition of making forms through line or tone.  However, I want to keep the tension of a desire for form, of a viewer's continuous looking for figures and references in a work.  So whilst rock formations may be apparent to the viewer, the surface will deny any solid figure on a ground.  The delineations will be broken by white erasures and black shadows that vie for dominance, a continual shift or negotiation for prominence.

I soak paper in the waterhole and then place it on a large rock, pushing the paper into the crevices in the rock.  I pour sumi ink over the paper, allowing it to settle and dry in the crevices.  I mix crushed ochres with a Japanese rice glue and paint two different colours on the paper and allow to dry.  Back at home I try erasing the ochres with a rubber but it is very unpleasant as I get hayfever and sore fingers.  I am also concerned with the painterly quality and strength of the ochre.  They refer too strongly to the Indigenous Kimberley Art Tradition.  I feel no right to paint country or have such a strong reference to the land so I wash the drawing in a tub and wipe back the ochres.  I love this work and feel like I am caressing the country.  The paper looks like beautiful drapes in Giotto's Italian frescoes and this link back to my art history and tradition reassures me.  As I work on the drawings more and more, they begin to have even stronger memories of ancient frescoes, as if they are remnants from a  lost painting.  I feel I am beginning to find a process to develop an understanding of the land here.



  







Monday, April 22, 2013

Ink and washing

My first approach to being in Kununurra was to immerse myself in the environment. Despite the extreme heat here in February I went walking in Mirima National Park to do sketches and get an understanding of the ground, the plants and animals and history of the land.  I can laugh now but my first forays were filled with trepidation.  The environment was so extreme, I packed carefully with water, phone, protective clothing and sketchbook.  Every sound seemed so new and unusual, there was a constant scampering in the bush and undergrowth that sounded like a large animal tracking me.  I have since found out that it is the small lizards and birds that make all the noise as they scamper out of my way.  There is an amazing bird, a type of pheasant that tumbles, crashing through the undergrowth, barking like a small dog.  Apparently it was mating season, but the recklessness and noise of the bird was startling during my walks until I realised it had nothing to do with my presence.

From these walks and sketches I found I was constantly drawn to the shadows caused by the fissures in the rocks.  The instability and vertigo I feel in this land seem to be mirrored in the collapsing rock formations, or perhaps caused by it?  I realise the lines and shadows come from the same pool or language about the land as the tree shadows and rhizomes of Gundaroo Common where I have been working for 8 years.  They reveal the lay of the land, the fissures, dips and gaps that may be treacherous underfoot.  They reveal the pathways of water that finds the quickest route down hill, carving away the softer layers and creating the significant land formations of the area.

 Rocks and shadows, Kununurra

However, once I started my test pieces I was drawn back to Kelly Knob.  There was something unnerving about standing on that lookout on slabs of rocks that appear to be shifting and moving beneath my feet.  I wanted to explore the vertigo that I felt in this place.  My position as a settler in a place that was of significance to the local Mirriwoong people and also to the many other language groups that visited Kununurra or worked at the base of the hill at Waringarri Art Centre.  How do I pay respect to a place so active in the original owners culture?  In Gundaroo I could rub back the land until I worked through the 2 cm of accumulated soil settled in the 200 years since occupation.  But if I rub back here I rub into country, into another culture and their laws.  This is the balancing act I wish to explore, how to have difference occupy the same space, whilst respecting Indigenous cultural privacy and deep knowledge of the country?  As settlers in this land, we need to learn how to care for it sensitively, acknowledging Indigenous precedence but also our own history, as hard as that may be to face.  It is the only way forward that I can think of, so I am using my culture and traditions to learn about the land and how I might share in its care and encourage others to acknowledge our responsibilities in this land.

Ink sketches on Kelly Knob, Kununurra, WA
I dipped my paper in a local billabong and took them up to the lookout on Kelly Knob.  I placed the paper in nooks and cranny's and in the shadows of  overhanging rocks and applied Sumi ink with a brush to follow in the crevices to reveal the fissures and forms of the rocks.  I also tried to rub the beautiful ochre colours into the paper like I had done in Gundaroo but soon found that the ochre was made of sandstone and cut and abraded my fingers and the paper.  I realised I needed water to do any rubbings on the work.

The Process

1. I drew with brush and ink on the horizontal ground, allowing chance to puddle the ink in the crevices of the rocks.  However, when placed on the vertical wall, the work was too much like a traditional figure on ground landscape rendition.  I wanted the marks to be more like a schism or a cut through the ground rather than suggesting any form.

2.  I took the drawings back out into the country and worked with the mud from a drying waterhole.  I wiped the paper with the mud a bit like applying ink to an etching plate.


3.  I wiped back the mud with my hands to reveal the surface of the rock beneath.  The sandy consistency rubbed my hands raw.  A friend once said a drawing project needs to be so intense that your hands bleed!  I'm certainly getting there.  I was also getting several layers of ground.  The ground of the rock, the paper as ground, the ground of the sumi ink and the ground of the mud.  These are layers that add to the meaning of the work.


4.  What do you do when you get back from a camping trip?  I always do the laundry washing.  It is a job I enjoy, cleaning the linen and clothes, drying, ironing and folding.  It is part of caring for my family and I love the smells and processes of cleaning and mending.  I tried to rub back the dirt surface with a rubber but suffered terribly from grit in my eyes and hayfever so I decided to try washing the excess off.  As I did this I made the link between caring for my family and caring for the land.  It is my traditional way of caring and seems appropriate.

5.  I hung the drawings out to dry and to get that lovely smell of sunlight on laundry.

6.  I perused the stains and the remains of the drawings on the paper.  I was pleased that the forms suggested in the initial drawings were now dissolving and becoming formless or oscillating between form and formlessness.  The works were becoming active and showing me a process that would be appropriate for the land here.  I was gaining knowledge of the country and my process was starting to echo the forming of the landmarks in the area.  In Mirima National Park there is a sign from the Mirriwoong language group explaining the country: "About 360 million years ago in the Devonian period, wind and water eroded highlands in the vicinity of present day Lake Argyle.  Sand was blown here forming dunes up to 30 metres high.  Deposits accumulated to a thickness of several hundred metres.  Today this sand makes up the layered sandstone rocks around you."  My drawing, washing, redrawing and washing, is surprisingly similar to the land's creation.

7. To complete the works I ironed and erased edges to make the work continue to dissolve and reform.  The harsh lines are the cuts and divisions made by settlers that have little respect for existing natural  or cultural boundaries.  As I stumble my way around this country I know that I will inadvertently make transgressions as I know little of the traditions of this country.  I ask advice and tread carefully.




Saturday, April 20, 2013

Rover’s line: Standing on the edge of a song


I am standing on the edge of a rocky outcrop in Kununurra, WA, looking down at pieces of paper that I have wedged in between rocks and overhangs trying to activate soggy pieces of paper into a response to the land.  It is a process that I use in my hometown of Gundaroo in NSW.  I dampen paper in the local dam, drag it around the common getting traces of mud and manure.  I then settle under the shadows of the remnant forest and start engaging with the ground, drawing, smearing erasing the natural ochres and charcoal, allowing the grasses below to reveal their pathways by embedding themselves in the paper.
 Rocks at Kelly Knob, Kununurra, WA
I now find myself living in the Kimberley’s, the land of ochre painting!  My hero, Rover Thomas sometimes painted at the Waringarri Art Centre just at the bottom of the hill I am standing on.  I look up from my paper and feel severe vertigo as the flat plane of the land suddenly reveals its distance from the plane of rock I was staring at. I doubt my right to be here and my attempt at drawing ‘country.’  Everything seems to be fighting against me.  My paper has dried in the extreme conditions and the beautiful sparkling ochre colours tantalising me in the rocks are actually sandstone and any attempt to smear them on to the paper results in tears and shredded fingertips.  
I am teetering on the edge of Kelly Knob, a terrible misnomer for a rocky outcrop of significance to the local Miriwoong language group.  There is a view of the Kununurra area equal to an eagles hovering perusal.  The ground is unstable as layers of sandstone exposed by weathering form rocky cliff faces.  The water seeps into the stone and erodes the softer layers causing breakages and collapses.   The effect is of dry broken brush marks in a shifting range of colours from pale yellow ochre, soft downy grey galah pinks, rusty reds and a deep stormy sunset purple.
I have seen a painting of Rover’s about this site that had a broad line mapping around the edge of the canvas, swooping in to the middle and looping around a black rounded triangular shape.  Deep red brown ochre dominated the canvas with the line a deeper, muddier brown.  The white dots traverse the border of the canvas and the edges of the line, accentuating the subtle shift between the land and the path through that land.  The mesmerising dots force the viewer to keep following the track around the board and never coming to rest. It is both an aerial map and a landscape view.  Continuously shifting from the horizontal to the vertical, the viewer is left unnerved.  
Sugar Bag Hill (Ilulunja), c1986
Rover Thomas (Joolama) (c1926—1998)
natural earth pigments and natural binder on plywood
80.0 x 100.0 cm

The dark brown line is the road that circumnavigates the township of Kununurra and it continues up the path to Kelly Knob, surrounding and accentuating the hill.  It is a simple mud map to the site, a prosaic description of an everyday manmade path.  When I first stand on the Knob and realise that I can see this aerial mapping, I feel a sickening wrench in my stomach and disappointment seeps in as I realised the secular nature of many of Rover’s works.  Living in Kununurra, I now see the simplicity and obviousness of the subject matter and it jarred against my previous relationships with Rover’s work.
However, it is both a mud map and something far more.  It is part of a song, a dream and a warning that the land needed caring for.   This painting and site is part of the Kurirr–Kurirr (Krill Krill) song that was composed by Rover Tomas in the 70’s.  The song came to him after the death of a senior countrywoman, close kin to Rover.  In a series of dreams she took him on the path her spirit took after her death in a car accident down the road near Halls Creek.  She gave him many verses and showed him the destruction of Darwin by Cyclone Tracey from this very spot.  It took some time before this song was fully recognised by Rover’s community but eventually, ceremonial boards were painted up by his classificatory uncle Paddy Jumangi and taken around the country.  It was the start of a famous art movement.
So, on Kelly Knob I am standing on the edge of this song,  the destruction of Cyclone Tracey was shown to Rover by his kinswoman in a dream.  I can easily remember Rover’s painting of Cyclone Tracey with its large black vortices and bands of winds and country feeding into it.  It hangs in the new Indigenous Australian galleries at the NGA in Canberra where I taught art students each week.  Now I am in the place where Rover was shown the destruction caused by the Rainbow Serpent; a warning to keep country strong, a powerful dream that has captured the imagination of all Australians.
Cyclone Tracy 1991





Rover Thomas (Joolama)
Warmun (Turkey Creek), Kimberley, Western Australia, Australia
Painting, natural earth pigments on canvas
168.0 h x 180.0 w cm


The power of his work is to take everyday life events, the mapping of a highway, a car accident, a hill above a colonising township and make it into a cultural icon.  As I continue to think about the painting and its elegance, I realise the intelligence and insight needed to pare a story down into elements.  A mud map, ochres and a dream are just the beginning of the way his paintings work.  The sophisticated operation of the shifting viewpoints from the aerial view above the land to the ants eye view looking up at the hill from the place where he painted it.
So where do I start in drawing this place?


Monday, April 15, 2013

Ground on Ground


Ground on Ground: negotiating instability
In Kununurra I find myself on the edge of other cultures.  The land I stand on is sung and painted by its traditional owners and the massive push of colonisation is continuing its insidious path. The environment is harsh and unforgiving and yet is painted in the famous Kimberley tradition with great love and respect.  My current project is to negotiate my way on this precipice; to find a way to share the land whilst acknowledging precedence of the traditional owners.  The sandstone rocks continuously shift and move and hold stories of great heartbreak that are better told by witnesses and descendants.  Scratch the surface and you touch ‘country’, a term that carries the weight of Indigenous culture with it.  This project will record my careful tread to find a space for communication across cultures whilst respecting ‘country’.

The project will be through the process of drawing, which I will use to find a common ground for negotiation across cultures.  Ground is a commonality that brings us together and is also what is most contested and continues to cause destruction and heartbreak.

Paper is traditionally considered the ground of drawing, the neutral receptor for an artist’s marks, which brings meaning into the work.  I consider paper in the same way the philosopher Deleuze discusses memory; as ‘a membrane that puts an outside and an inside into contact, makes them present to each other, confronts them or makes them clash.’  Paper itself has a memory from its manufacturing process to the art historical tradition that it carries.  My job is to continue to challenge and extend that tradition.  

 Kununurra Kuts, digital photograph, Kelly's Knob, Kununurra, WA