LANDPRINTS: SWAN RIVER
“I genuinely feel that the land here has not really been painted yet – except by some singular artists and, of course, Aboriginal ones, and this is because we’ve imposed European or other foreign models on something most peculiarly different” (John Wolseley 1994 quoted in Grishin 2015, 9). I’ve lost count of the number of people that have remarked on the similarity of my work to that of John Wolseley’s. I can’t deny this either, Wolseley has been the most influential artist on the development of my creative practice. My project centres on the development of a creative body of work in response to Swan River/Derbal Yerrigan as a site, using site-responsive methods and techniques similar to Wolseley’s, to understand how an artistic response to site may develop a sense of place and belonging. The quote above captures the concerns I have grappled with the past few years and gets to the heart of the conceptual significance of my project: how does one paint the land properly? What does it mean to paint the land properly? That is: how do I, as an artist, represent the supposed ‘true’ character, the essence, of the land as landscape? These questions float to the surface, churned out of the riverbed sediment by the underlying desire to belong; to connect somehow with the land in the absence of deep cultural and spiritual practices that might forge that connection.
These questions are complex, because aesthetics and ethics are inextricably entangled, especially in a colonial nation like Australia in which land and belonging are so contested. The landscape I arrive at has already been transformed to fit an aesthetic ideal; seasonal wetlands dredged and filled for urban development or transformed into perennial lakes; new islands constructed; a river transformed, its mouth opened up for the sake of commerce, its banks homogenised, cleared, and grassed over for weekend barbeques. What was unique, ‘peculiarly different’, about the land has been erased in the attempt to transform it into an image of England. How can one connect to a land so thoroughly subjugated and altered? Through art? To what extent is there even an ‘essence’ of the place left to represent?
My intention in employing site-responsive practices was to understand how this method of working might dissolve this separation of the human from the site in the representation of land, and how this might work toward developing a sense of place and belonging. I’ve done this through a practice based in an embedded response to being within the site, moving through it, using the natural, physical materials of the land in the process of making the work. Paperbark is set upon the surface of the paper, washed with watercolour, still wet. Capillary action traces the material elements of the site (paperbark) as they touch the paper, travelling the narrow spaces of the bark texture. It leaves its mark, like a fingerprint, as the pigment pools and dries in the friction ridges. These site-responsive practices can be understood as a collaboration with the material elements of the place/site, a direct trace of the physical identity of the place in the production of the work, so that the artwork emerges out of an organic process partly directed by the site itself. The site speaks itself through the emergence of the work; a co-responsible co-production that articulates the integrated nature of place (place as primarily a relation between the human and non-human/nature).
Photographs by Dan McCabe.