I have been toying with books, perusing them, collecting them and reading them for as long as I can remember. A hand guide to the Highlights of Rome, seen in the hallway book case at eye level as a five year old must be the earliest. Confronting the Venus of Cirene, even in the smallest black and white reproduction - unforgetable.
Many of my works have sprung from ideas engendered by books found in obscure places at random moments; in op shops and flea markets. The cardboard box tucked away under a forgotten counter of a forgotten shop contained, amongst other things, thirty five identical copies of Shakespeare’s A Mid-summer Nights’ Dream. These became Philomel with melody &c. (1982), under pressure of wondering what to do next in my last year at Art School. In Philomel reconfigured lines from the Dream were aligned into a new narrative arrangement without sacrificing the integrity of their original sentences or phrases. Nine volumes, and the cover of the entire book were ‘frozen open’ behind glass and tissue paper, in an edition of three, a textual counterpoint to Labyrinth (1981), a large trompe l’oeil grass maze constructed and mown away in the autumn of that year.
The collage series Disorient World (1985) evolved out of the hermetic dismemberment of a 1911 Chatterbox Annual, bought for $3 in a jumble sale on Glebe Point Rd, Sydney in 1984. This whimsical series, made while a Masters student at the Sydney College of the Arts in 1985, was pieced together without the slightest idea of what it might be about. Collaged pieces were placed where they seemed reasonable, and unreasonable - selections being made from the limited resource that the fabric of the book offered. The series became a touch stone for further works, including the colour cell Disorient World sequences of 1986, two of which are included in the exhibition, and Three Textures (1986) which connects to both series mentioned.
Such systematic ways of working have been a natural feature of my work over many years – part and parcel of the same programatic engine that drove the production of the large scaled wood cut prints, such as net-work: the prison of vision (1987), Blueprint (for a moment of inertia) (1989), and White Terrace (1990), entailing the hand carving and hand burnishing of hundreds of square metres of craftwood and canvas. Many may wonder why works such as these are included in a show about books. All germinated from sketch books or illustrated sources such as Garran’s Picturesque Atlas (1886), colonial period newspapers, Chatterbox Annual (1911), already mentioned, or Eugen von Guerard’s tiny landscape format sketch-book that he took on his ascent of the Australian Alps in 1862.
In late 1997, while researching Australian photography at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, I entered one of the galleries displaying two exquisite cabinet paintings by William Mulready, painted in 1838 and 1839. They were painted in the strong pallette of colours characteristic of the Pre-raphaelite painter, Holman Hunt, and depicted two quintessential moments of Victorian sensibility. One, The Sonnet, depicted a maiden reading a poem to a young man, in hunched attentiveness. The other, entitled Open your mouth and shut your eyes, after the popular Victorian era catch phrase ‘Open your mouth and shut your eyes, and see what tomorrow may bring’, showed a young man reclining, side on to the viewer dangling a cherry, about to be consumed by a young maiden, herself caught in a swoon of making a wish.
I stood alone in the gallery, dumbstruck. There was the maiden from my work of eleven years before, but in beautifully rich colours of flesh and garment. Strangely she also wore a ruby red dress. Upon return to Australia I referred to my archive of scraps and off-cuts from the production of Disorient World, and there were Mulready’s name and the title on the remnants of the mauled engraving.
Of the many commentaries which have endeavoured to unpack this work, the questioning words of Laura Murray Cree, former editor of Art & Australia, stand out foremost in my mind; "is the man diving into the metaphorical river of life of into the dreamlike waters of the subconscious?; does the exaggerated spiral of steam rising from the hand-held cup in the middle panel represent a transformative essence or ‘holy spirit’, or has the cup as chalice been reduced to a domestic object?; in the right hand panel, is the girl awaiting a kiss or is her open mouth about to receive the body of Christ in communion?; is that the hand of earthly authority in the top right-hand corner of two of the panels, or is it the hand of God?…in this work, we have a compelling and beautiful riddle that is without coherence or solution." The reading of the work, its wonderment, remains open, like a book.
In contrast, Blueprint (for a moment of inertia) (1989) is a work that moves in the direction of consciously recognising its history. The four signatures at the right hand base of the work, are witness to the journey that the image has been on over its 150 year history. Hayman’s, the engraver is there, as is Frank Mahony’s and James Gleeson’s. My signature is woodcut in reverse into one of the twelve metre square plates that make up the composite image. When in New Zealand with a touring exhibition in 1989 I came across two mid-nineteenth century engraved versions of the Maori haka represented in the picture, by Williams and Robley, thus deepening the history of authorship evident in the work.
In these woodcut works the sourcing had its own internal logic and urgency but the filtration and mediation processes are a world removed from the direct methods of working I have been pursing in recent years.
Half of the 1990s were spent in my own creative wilderness – teaching, researching, administering – with infrequent and often unsatisfying attempts at using media I was unfamiliar with, such as ink, pencil, charcoal and pastel. In retrospect all of these struggles gave way in 1997 to a drawing project on pages removed from a few broken volumes of Encyclopaedia Britannica, cast offs from the State Library of South Australia, and a gift from a friend. The twin series became known as Encyclopaedia of Days (1997-98), in part a reference to the diaristic unfoldment of their production over a two year period that ended with my departure from Wollongong and fulltime university employment in 1998.
The pages were carefully unpicked, and prepared with a wash of ink and shellac. The drawing commenced with small brush marks, flowing and turning, in small aimless arabesques, limited by the constraints of the text block of each double page. Drawn sometimes with the right hand, sometimes with the left, I have thought of them as stream of consciousness drawings, but they now seem more like free fall exercises to see what might happen when one allows oneself some latitude.
In the process, without trying to stem the flow of content, male and female figures welled up, clothed and nude, animals and men, ponds and trees, children and portrait close-ups, and shallows of water, everywhere immersing water, flowing over and half obscuring the lives of saints, scholars, polymaths, poets, world geography and agricultural statistics, embedded in the twin columns of text underneath, below the drawing. Only a fraction of the hundreds of drawings that comprise the twin series are presented here.
Concurrently I travelled out to Lake Mungo, in far western New South Wales in 1997. In response to the visual problems that such an environment forced upon me I was compelled, much later, to break the spine of the sketch book which contained the clutch of observation drawings of the native pines that pepper the sand hills around the parched lake bed. After unpicking the pages, I proceeded on a drawing that was to consume almost the entire fabric of the book of Tables for the Proofing of Spirits. The resultant work, Mungo Lunette (1997-99), 9.6 metres in length, shows the dawn breaking over a sun bleached landscape, with its paginated temperature gauge increasing from left to right as the dawn unfolds to the full light of a 100 degree Fahrenheit day.
The text and texture of these book works formed a link between one part of my life and another, between one way of imagining, and picturing the imaginative world, through found means, and an entirely different way of generating images and nurturing possibilities.
The past three years have been a transition period – returning to the roots of a landscape based practice, latent in my work for more than two decades, yet hidden from my view for years at a time. I had the good fortune to be able to see works from 1987, 1995, 1999 and 2003 all speaking to each other about the experience of landscape when a version of this exhibition was shown at the UTS Gallery, Sydney in early 2003.
Late last year I was forced to reckon with the remnants of my teenage years, left in store at my mother’s home of fourty years, which was demolished. Things left and forgotten for half a life time included a portfolio of drawings from 1976-77. I am grateful that they have survived. One telling drawing, of a far distant Mount Barker, used the finely hatched lines of a Rotoring pen for the distant trees. It gave evidence to memory that I had been carefully looking back to the distant rain shadow horizon, then, as now, where I have been at work for the past two years. Twenty five years had passed and I received an uncanny gift, echoing that fact that I have arrived back at the same place, still in search of ink notations that would match my experience, and carrying the same foldaway seat that I had carried in my pack all those years before.
Right now I am observing, walking and joyously drawing in this rain shadow landscape of my youth, on the eastern boundary of the Adelaide Hills that falls away to the plain down towards the Murray River. I am not sure of where the journey is taking me. For the moment my work has returned to an observation-based practice, and the outcomes are sweeping panoramas of country I am moving through, and am moved by. The texture of the place, brittle, windswept, and bare feels right, as if following by word and deed the Scriptural injunction to go and be a hewer of wood and a drawer of water.
