still liFe wiTh crOoked Tea pOt, chlorOphyl aNd OchRe

I have been having lots of fun painting and drawing. (I feel like my poems are drawings because i use the sense of sight and they read very visual/descriptive). I have been recovering a lot of the pigments i have collected and playing around with chlorophyl. It is nice to work with greens again. It might seem strange, but i have been playing with still life. But it’s not so still! There are phsycic resonances in these things: After conversation: the left behind objects like teapot and cups carry a story: a potent narrative: Vase with Banksia pod and brushturkey feather sticking out: the feeling of spirited handprints reaching across and out of the table, the life of ideas and plans: simple things, who is going to run the bath for the children: big things… How can any sane human being cut down the old growth forests of Australia? The deep love of ourselves and each other that we find when we really connect: the presence of shadows, hurt and the dead: possibility… when we talk about good ideas and begin the journey of nurturing them into life.

Climbed up sandstone weather eroded rocks
patterns like oceans
of memory
the song
of
bare skinned dances:

My daughters six year old feet
covered in yellow clay
and crystal sand shards: She made faces and looked deep
into
the valleys
hundreds of meters below.

A creek line cool feeding a forest of vines,

we are looking at old sassafras trees,
they have leaves
the same colour as her eyes.
-Flat rock caves spring 2011

I started working with natural pigments as a teenager. A close friend taught me how to collect and use tree sap, you put it into a jar with a little water and leave it in the sun for a few days: (thanks to that special person). That set me off on a decade of painting with clays, ochre’s, chlorophyl, charcoal and tree sap: at the time i didn’t think about what it meant, i didn’t have much money and these materials were freely available. As i worked with these natural pigments i became interested in environmental activism and politics. To collect and use natural pigments is not only an attempt to liberate myself from industrial capatlyst control over creativity: it has been a journey into belonging to place: spiritual belonging: and the politics of colonisation that exists there. Recently i have enjoyed learning about others who also work in this way, especially Blue Mts artist Scott Marr: Have a look at his work… it’s really interesting.

Under rusting tin roof

tall
spotted gum      iron bark

coiling

terracotta
star valley vessels

ancestors

dotted
earth
skins

talking        drinking
a
cup of tea

smoke from the campfire

+Anakie, Nymboida

Connective Aesthetics

Suzi Gablik in her essay, ‘Connective Aesthetics’ talks about a move away from the modernist mythologies in art making. The individualist artist working at making their own vision of the world. Gablik criticizises the modernist approach and suggests its growing redundancy. We don’t need more artists making individualised products, but artists that work to “affirm our radical relatedness” (Gablik, p2). Artists who seek aesthetics based in, “less monocentric mythologies” (p2) are redefining cultural myths. Gablik writes, “Art that is grounded in the realization of our interconnectedness and intersubjectivity – the intertwining of self and others – has a quality of relatedness that cannot be fully realised through monologue: it can only come into its own dialogue, as open conversation (Gablik, p4). Viewing art is no longer about artist/spectator binary, it is not just about the individual author.

I like Suzi Gabliks ideas. I am sure there is more to it than i can understand and probably heaps of critique. When i first read her book ‘The re-enchantment of Art’ i changed my way of making art work. I no longer just make paintings/drawings alone. Most of these works have been in collaboration with my partner and children. I have an easel set up in our main living space, where the Tv would normally be, we often make art together and its fun: we learn about each other and create the visual narratives of our home and the journeys that converge there.

Looking down cascade gully of sassafras: Coachwood: Listening to whats old:  Dig it out this way: Mix: Fine red dust: in the water crystals

down the track past boulders and tall turpentine trees

seed pod space ships: nettles overhanging the path: climbed up naked to stand in the falling water: then: collected some nettles: to make tea at home with my lover.

                                              +Royal National Park

Rusted rio rod
red
hot in campfire

burning
holes in green
bamboo

smell of resin smoke
ghost

measured
into

key

or

wild      flute    melodie

                                                                                                                                            +Waterfall

Beauty, wonder and good energy for the earth.

Re-spiriting matter/more than human

In the green studies reader, the Ecocritical theorist, Lawrence Buell defines Ecocriticism through what he calls the, “environmental imagination” (Buell, L 2000, p1). According to Buell, It is the ‘environmental imagination’ that attempts to understand potential environmental crisis. It is also the ‘environmental imagination’ that seeks strategies within culture to stop environmental destruction taking place. Buell writes, “Environmental crisis is not merely one of economic resources, public health and political gridlock” (Buell, L 2000, p1).  He is suggesting that approaches to environmental crisis are not limited to the most obvious arenas, that there are other ways that this perceived crisis is being approached. The ‘environmental imagination’ is one such way. He goes on to write, “The success of environmentalist efforts finally hinges not on some highly developed technology or arcane new science, but on a state of mind: on attitudes, feelings, images, narratives” (Buell, L 2000, p1). The ‘environmental imagination’ does this by inspiring change in the way people understand nature. It works to create culture that values the environment with care and responsible connection. Buell suggests a number of approaches that Ecocriticism uses to achieve these aims under the umbrella term of the ‘environmental imagination’. These include art forms which: Seek reconnection with place, a re-visioning of the future to be a place of cultural sensitivity and ecological care, and connection with the experience of other people and non-human nature.

Deer were introduced into the royal national park area early in the English colony for the sport of hunting. Later after the area became national park the deer had survived and thrived. Environmental concerns decided that the animals were damaging the local ecosystem and hunters were given licence to remove the deer from the park.

HUNTED

Sleeping
on the beach

beneath ocean size storm
clouds

a herd of deer.

Headlights of a car
coming down
the
hillside

The red spotted Angophoras
twisted

by

the coastal sandstone
and wind.

The deer sleep
on
a hill of sand
bone
and the campfire
shells
of
molluscs

-Little Era Beach

 

KURADJI

Wind Swept
dunes

cockatoo screech
over the dozers
and
road grader

fire and smoke
Skeleton found by brothers
rested 5000 years
or more
being torn poured with bitumen
still singing people
together.

-Sandon Point

The Australian writer Val Plumwood believes that the nature/culture split can be changed by Ecocritical writing. Plumwood suggests giving voice to the more than human as a way of re-spiriting dead matter. In his poetic essay journey to the heart of stone, Plumwood discusses how writers can challenge, “The experiential framework of dead silent matter entrenched by the sado-disspassionate rationality of scientific reductionism” (Plumwood in Beckett & Gifford 2007, p18). The way to do this suggests Plumwood is to recover an understanding of matter as spirited. He calls for a project that encourages us to, “to think beyond these boundaries, to re-invest with speech, agency and meaning the silenced ones, including the earth and its very stones, cast as the most lifeless members of the earth community” (Plumwood in Beckett & Gifford 2007, p22). The writer can re-spirit matter by work that gives voice to the non-human. By doing this the writer can not only help open up space for the world to talk to human communities, but also they can help the human communities learn how to listen. This is a way of healing a wounded space.

Road-kill

We meet
dressed
in fur
our own
and road kill.

clean and eaten.

The forest canopy
is
skeletal
remains
under our feet,

covered in mud
covered in earth.

I am smoked
by campfire,

dreads full of seashells,

we are returning
to
cook lentil stew
in our kitchen:

coming home
to
sleep -dance our reunion.

-Dundurrabin/Nymboida

Home songs

“Many people do not quite have their own song and dance. Current music is too much a commodity, too much in flux, it cannot dye us. We are not quite sure what our home music is.” Gary Snyder, The Practice of the wild, p24.

Being part of a colonising race, (pure Ozzy mongrel), has given me a legacy of confusion. My own traditional song has been lost. This personal/family/land displacement has come at the cost of indigenous homelands, massacre, theft, the stolen generation. It’s a two-way destruction. I am stuck with the spiritually redundant capatlyst/industrialist culture.

Recently i heard the Australian activist john seed interviewed on the radio. He believes that he is part of an older ancestry, a joint ancestry. The Cenozoic era is our common heritage that we share with the earth as a whole living being. He asks the question, should we throw away that heritage away just so we can buy a new TV or microwave?

These issues are really central to my art.

Art becomes a way of deep enjoyment for the spirit, this is its healing aspect. Don’t need a new TV because we stay up late playing music, songs we write or our friends write, drinking fresh herbal tea from the garden: paintings are dynamic teaching narratives that transform us as we wash dishes, rinse the sprouts, knead the bread…

By its very self-sufficient nature: art making is a form of activism because it feeds the spirit: fulfills that deep human need to sing and dance, to communicate with the whole body: to touch in relationship the tender places.

In 1910, the African-American boxer Jack Johnson knocked out his white opponent Tommy Burns in one round. The boxing match took place in Rushcutters bay on a make shift ring in front of thousands of white Australians: Captain cook discovered Australia! (he didn’t notice that land was already occupied by a cultured people).  In the 1790′s Pemulwuy lead the Eora, Tharawal and Darug people in a resistance campaign that almost got rid of the English colony.

So here we are, trying to make a home, trying to belong: trying to find a home song and dance.

Toxic culture/Earth written

The work Toxic Culture, describes the death of my father. It is also questioning the use of a commercial acrylic medium, positioning it as an inherently sick media. In the words of Suzi Gablik, “Modern individuals do not see the earth as a source of spiritual renewal, they see it as a stock pile of raw materials to be exploited and consumed.” (Gablik, S. 1991, p77) In this work I am suggesting that acrylic paint media reinforces a toxic culture and an exploitation of the earth. Art critic Robert Hughes has pointed out “What strip mining is to the earth, the art market has become to culture” (Hughes, R in Gablik. 1991, p146) Working with this media reinforces a capitalist colonisation of the imagination and art making.

In this painting, the cycle of death is represented by the flesh coloured figure standing on a road that leads to the figure of death coming from out of the hillside. It is important to note that they are also linked by the cigarette that they both share, and this completes the circle that links the dead with the living. The crown symbolises the father and the fall of the father. This can also be read as they demise of a patriarchal society and suggests that the figure that is alive is taking that cigarette not to smoke, but to stub out and reject.

I have deep emotional connections with  my children, I fear their pain in the context of a sick culture and hope to hold space for them in the world. To find a father/patriarchal figure that nurtures a sense of belonging to a sacred earth and a culture that treats it so.  The Austrian painter Hundertvasser, who also worked with some found pigments, has said that all he wanted to do was, “liberate himself from the universal bluff of civilisation.” (Restany, P. 2001, p?.) Working with found natural materials, pigments and some post consumer waste helps me to counter the arrogance and cynicism of our culture. It also helps me to liberate my imagination and to activly re-imagine, through cultural embodiment, healthy networks of sacred connection.

These paintings were made in collaboration with Ember Peace my 1 and a half year old daughter.

“Love is the reality, poetry is the drum that calls us to that!”

+Rumi

Fence song

Text is seen as being more than codes of English language and extend to the movement of the world. I have attempted to translate the texts of supermarket and fence into poetry. By juxtaposing elements of visual born information, syntax is realigned with the complex interactions of the world text. There is no naturally clear way to think or write this. Rules make no real sense of this world text. The text of supermarket is deeply and radically fragmented, thus the language and its lexicon/syntax must also be a radical formation of fragmented and juxtaposed words. I ask myself how the covered up blooms of forests and indigenous sacred sights meet with a policeman pushing a shopping trolley who is walking past coffee grown in a South American slave trade deforestation advertising cover-up. Allen Ginsberg writes in the introduction to his collected works (2007), “Syntax punctuation Captilisation remain idiosyncratic, retaining the variable measure of nervous systematics” (p6). I also claim the disclaimer of a universal idosyncratics based in the diversity of nervous system language systematics. My bodies ‘nervous systematics’ order perception of the mundane in a complex song of ecological interactions. By doing this the mundane is aligned with the depth of wonder and grief of a mysterious unexplained cosmos. It is also aware of the politics that limit it, define it and harm it.

I have also worked with an interdisciplinary hybridity. The text takes the shape of the body, female/male subject positions are negotiated against the back drop of the mundane. The text takes a non-linear form. Text can be read up a leg, on a breast or even realigned in the shape of penis, neck or finger.

deep space tracking antenna

“real wealth consists of things of beauty and utility, of surrounds inspiring to live in”.

-Emma Goldman

I started this painting the other night, i am interested in relationship and the journey of lovers: there is always somthing to learn about the people that i love: Realising that i have trouble communicating because there is heaps of fear that gets in the way of being able to see: Looking through a book called “discovering the universe”: i found this object/technology that is coded deep space tracking antenna and being able to relate to it: decided that is exactly what this picture needs (look close in the landscape beyond!) being someones lover/partner/friend is a lot like looking into deep space: seeing the most mind boggling things: things that are incredibly beautiful and humbling!

Kettle shaman

One night i was cooking on the fire outside, getting cleansed by smoke, i was feeling a gentle warmth all through my body, it is deeply healing to be outside at night, the kettle was boiling infinitely, i began this painting by nibbling on some lemon balm leaves and Brahmi herb, mixing some ochre from where i was born and using my fingers to paint his/her? hair. Later my partner Julie came and added the moon and tree and leaves.

 

 

 

It is strange how wildly different feelings and meanings can be made in different forms of mediation.

 

 

 

 

After collecting some old cardboard boxes i decided to remake them into paper. On a warm day, which can be rare in  the Blue Mountians, i got my one year old daughter ember to help, we tore up the boxes and mixed up the pieces with our hands into pulp. We put lots of lavender and other herb medicines in too! Later i made a small frame with mozzie netting to shape the fibre into paper, piled the sheets up on an old kitchen cupboard door between ripped up rectangles of old jeans, then put it all on the driveway and reversed the van on top to press it! recycled paper!

Not sure what to do with it now though?

I think it is exciting to be able to do things that move away from our dependency on capitalism and industrialisation…

Un-colonising the imagination.

Free to express the immanent beauty of our humanity.