Blood in the gully
and
Unknown sculpture. C.1987 Retrieved 2020
Sydney postcard
July sky
Sydney’s like London, a carbon copy when carbon was ok.
Yes. It does have a different climate, and sky. We always imagined the distance and difference vast, but no. It’s the same mismatch of pre-industrial, industrial and and post-industrial buildings separated by roads and parks and people dressed for town. It’s got the same emissions. Values are shared and also under investigation.
So flying’s off the radar, which is great. Go to Sydney and you go to London by default. Go to Sydney, go to most cities, to achieve a similar if not the same result.
Travel promises to deliver difference, exoticism. It worked well for the travel industry, but badly for the climate.
If you want to try for something different, don’t make so much money!
Careless beautiful
Architrave snagged
The length of the architrave snagged by the trees held to the truck by one rope pulled at an angle just short of breaking, constitutes carelessness on the one hand and a rare conjunction on the other, worthy of recording here.
Snagged architrave
Finely drawn white arcs reach up to connect with a dark web of lines and deny their alignment with the truck. By being both no longer part of the truck and not entirely married to the tree, they become one autonomous object.
One does not expect to encounter a ray of light by day, in this location outside the light light shop at Queanbeyan, of all places.
Before I identified the reality of the dislodged load, that’s what it was, for maybe two seconds.
I am not ready to identify that which seeks to be illuminated. The rays do appear to reach through the tangled web though, which is promising. . .
Crows nest postCard
Hayberry Street
It’s not often you get dialogue between the road and a tree. Because of the presence of the tree (in the photo above), the road marking’s shape and length become pronounced. Because of those lines, the bends in the trunk curve more strikingly.
This conversation forms the gateway to my brother’s house. It is a portal.
‘Be ready’, it says.
Reinventing the peel
There is little point going over ground already covered. Some subjects have little scope for reflection or renewal..
Peeling a banana may be one of those subjects.
Having said that, I have noticed I think quite a lot about how I peel the banana which I would like to explore.
On the one hand (sic), I attempt to peel the banana perfectly. On the other, I try to peel the banana a new way every day.
We are modelled in our peeling technique by the monkey. They hold the banana in one hand and apply the ‘peel and rotate until peeled’ technique, which leaves the peel in a hilt over the hand.
This is deeply unsatisfying. Not only do we (temporarily) lose a hand in the process of eating the banana, but also, we are obliged to eat the banana as if it had a top and a bottom and a first and last bite.
The first bite though, is similar to the last. There is no first and last bite, when the first can easily be last and vice versa. The banana needs to have its nature represented accurately.
I peel the banana by cutting the stalk end with a knife. This reduces bruising the end of the banana. I peel down until the flesh of the banana is exposed and then I peel it back towards the normal eating end. This produces not a petal the monkey makes, but a double the length of the banana peel. This is then folded back again to make which it three times the banana’s length. This can be discarded easily, in one part.
Through this technique, I reveal the banana as fully three dimensionally realised.
Its shape is liberated from not having a beginning and an end. It can be now be eaten any which way.
The monkey technique does provide an inbuilt napkin to keep the fingers from becoming sticky. Sticky fingers though is preferable to subservience.
Getting to the truth involves removing the covers, to best reveal what is hidden by the covers. In the instance of peeling the banana, the intension is to maximise the pleasure of the eating.
Old post
This post may be new today but by tomorrow it will be old. It will be old for most of its life. It will sit in the middle of the rest of the posts. It will linger in the shadows without the benefit of the screen light the latest post enjoys.
This post is old-ready.
The usual blog reader tends to be time poor, with no time to linger, to savour. The form has limits. We cannot curl up with a blog as easily as we can curl up with a book. You never hear, ‘Let’s go for a scroll’.
This post functions as a lure, to entice readers into the back catalogue of posts.
Just like the dog, having chased the kangaroos into the dam is then pulled under the water to drown, so does this post entice the reader to scroll onto the murky waters of the past, to drown. (Just kidding).
While posts tend to sit in chronological order, the newest is afforded the best advantage with the implication being that earlier posts have already been read.
I am reminded of returning to Wamboin to find unread newspapers and how compelling and chock full of absorbing stories they are When they are ‘new’, there is the uncomfortable pressure of gulping them down, to be up to date.
The idea of the old post promotes the benefits and richness of looking backwards that our culture has mostly resisted.
I am so pleased to find you here.
Beauty’s frame
Just like a sculpture needs to be hidden, to make you want to look at it, so does beauty everywhere hide. Beauty that insists on being seen, is seen through and is invisible.
The woman at Kennards who rented me the plate lifter was male in gait and in her clothing and her face was dirty. Her voice was rough, in keeping with the expectations of customers. There it was though, plain as day, the face (and body)* of an angel. She was beautiful.
Just like leaves, trees and rocks in front of a sculpture conceal it, to make you want to look, so were these layers of clothes, gait, and demeanour, covers that provided a frame to show the beauty of this woman, this person.
An image of the aforesaid person who served me at Kennards may have been useful to illustrate this idea however, its absence allows us better to imagine her (them) and her (their) **beauty.
* You normally only hear of the face of the angel, as if an accompanying body will somehow diminish the angel status.
** I am only just beginning to transplant gender specific words for gender neutral words.
SplitTing
Can’t do without matches here. Matches deliver warmth and food.
Staying warm requires firewood being split. After a time everything has the capacity to split, even the redheads through the hourglass.
Split Redheads
No surf heRe
Water emulating water elsewhere.
Water anywhere is a sponge and reproduces what lies overhead. Here it unlocks my separation from a life on the coast. Waves rushing in space emulate the way dreams can recompose the world.
Dirt
The task is to restore the grass to the top of the hill. The kangaroos have no predator, the local folk lore says, and so they multiply to the landscape’s detriment. The bald patches are starting to join.
A dam is a negative mine. They dig a hole not to take something but to put something in. When they dig the hole they scrape off the top soil and leave it in a pile next to the dam for rabbits and wombats to live in.
No one lives there any more and we wanted to make more space around the dam.
What to do with the dirt?
With the aid of earth moving machinery the big pile was made into four piles which were spread indecisively across the block by a tipper truck.
These four piles were like hills in the foreground, made to look so by having the real thing in the distance.
With the aid of a wheel barrow and my body I have spread the middle pile of soil into the bald patches where the grass is receding. They look like hills too, but not in the near distance, but the far distance, being that they are so small and spread out.
Original pile
Indecisive pile
Smallest piles
A Prayer
It’s not so much sorry. It’s, I was asleep and now I’m waking up.
The works scattered over the site here at Wamboin are landscape punctuations, which give the words of the landscape structure and sense.
They are signs. Signifiers. They are the traffic cops of their immediate community.
They are, if we were so inclined, temples, to remind you that you are in paradise, because we tend to forget.
I haven’t been to Bali, but I believe they employ similar punctuations in the landscape for similar reasons.
The works establish a connection to the landscape from which they can never be released.
Each work is a link in a chain. Any links removed cause the land to come adrift again.
The word ‘sorry’ has been debased by personal relationship squabbles. The sorrier always comes across pathetic, weak, unattractive. I seek to remain attractive and resist using the word, but I suppose I am, in a way, sorry.
We have to get it right this time. We think we tried before and failed. Why try again?
There are so many amazing aboriginal voices now, we cannot drown them out with our preconceptions. Filmmaker and chef Warwick Thornton, actor and storyteller Meyne Wyatt, playwright and comedian Nakkiah Lui, Victor Steffensen from Firesticks. These voices, these artists hold our attention with their compelling subject.
This place at Wamboin was recently called Sculpture in The Sky
It’s Sorry Country today.
Why use colour?
A neighbour at Wamboin quizzed the table at dinner.
No painter had explained why they use colour. What purpose did it serve?
A satisfactory answer would remove the pleasure of the riddle. At dinner.
Fire with green flame
Painting celebrated liberation from the brush with stained canvasses in the 1970’s. Paint was applied directly to the canvas. Colour was integrated into the material of the canvas. The photo above emulates the stained canvas.
Without the burden of subject, colour went free range. It was allowed to swell or contract. It could spread according to the volume of paint applied. Relations between colours and shapes were improvised, responding and listening to the each other, seeking out unity, harmony, clarity and pleasure.
In the instance above, the viewer is intrigued by the surprise appearance of green, uncharacteristic of fire colour. The viewer slips from the vacant pleasure of colour to anxiety about a toxic substance in the fire.
Red flames
We are pleased therefore in the second image to see employed a red, which competes with the green more compellingly. The green is more alive. It is happier and dancing more freely. It invites a companion too. A minor part, but the yellow in the top right corner makes a welcome site. We have been consumed by the pleasure and forgotten about the toxicity factor.
Green’s loss of composure
One voice in a group can fail to listen and therefore not happily integrate the other voices. Above, green rejoices at the expense of not only the other colours, but also the space of the picture has become claustrophobic. Harmony is out the window.
Happy as a button
The green here is positioned and sized to perfection. It resonates happily in the space, as happy as a button. Even despite the presence of the shadow corners!
Memo
How can I bring the richness of ‘fond remembrance’ to the present?
How can I look fondly on now, without the benefit of distance?
Is the present such a tangled web that you can’t see through it?
With the present in the foreground, you can trip over stuff. Vigilance removes the capacity for reflection.
The present then, lays a foundation for future reflection. A prior requirement to live for the present is now run its course. Living in the now is barren from its lack of embedded distance.
Live for the future past.
A Thank you
James Packer gets no credit from my acquaintances. Everything is symbolism with the new casino at Barangaroo.
Evil is always looming in the background with any work of genius. You can’t judge the book by its driver.
When the dust has settled after the age of greed has passed, the casino will emerge. It’s not the second coming after the twin towers demise but the new casino has risen like a ghost from the murky waters of Barangaroo, resplendent.
It has two heroic angles, one from Darling Harbour where it is dead sexy and one from the approach to the city from the bridge, where these photos were taken.
It’s kinda scary if you look at it with eyes wide open, like all good works are a bit scary. It makes its neighbours prosaic, ordinary, uninSPIREing.
Even as we go round the corner of the city into Balmain, we are not afforded the same curves, it puts up a challenge to the bridge and declares, I am The New Edge.
Taking dictation
Just when you want to have your say, no, you have to listen.
The landscape is refusing to take a back seat here at Wamboin.
For the sculptures to find their place in the landscape, they need to become assimilated and virtually disappear. The more you try to give the works their voice, the more you want to look away. You only want to look when you want to look for them. How many times do I place a work behind a tree or rock or bush? Every time.
A lifetime of work will not quench the landscape’s thirst.
Pride has no role here.
I had hoped that there would be something to show, but there will always only ever be this articulated nothing, which does not warrant attention.
I shall put an invisible sign at the gate:
PLEASE ENTER. WITNESS HERE THE ACCUMULATION OF SUSTAINED SUBTRACTION
In life’s pursuit of ‘nothing in particular’, this is a reasonable outcome. If this constitutes an example of ‘applied modesty’, then that is of no note and this block must sit alongside my neighbours and expect no preferential treatment.
This is where we find ourselves, taking rather than giving dictation. It is right.
Vertical and horizontal beams
Ground beam, made from light.
Sky beam, made from steel
Ground beam. This beam was projected from a crack in the door of the shed. Being that the door is so high, the beam was this long. It is as thick on the ground as light is and only fog and daylight can erase it. When it is erased, there is no waste.
Sky beam. This beam is part of a steel sculpture. Unlike the ground beam, the sky beam is not erased by daylight. The ground beam requires our presence in the shed whereas the sky beam projects in our absence.
The word beam has been applied to steel and to wood and to light. The only requirement of a beam is to travel in (any) one direction, like a crow.
The sun
The Concersion
Reconciling the vertical with the horizontal is one of the big challenges.
We aspire (to the vertical), but we have to be realistic, (the horizontal).
Object and subject
Recently I speculated on how a text can alter the reading of an image. When are the roles swapped between primary and secondary? When does the driver swap seats?
See May 8 post, titled ‘Peripheral Core’.
In my deliberations about making a life here at Wamboin, I had imagined the land and all the changes wrought by our presence would remain primary. These blog posts would always remain supportive, ethereal, virtual.
It is possible though, just as the explanation of the ‘image’ can become the driver, so can the blog become foreground and the landscape can drop back. It is the blog which holds the more tangible substance. The slippery landscape is just mud and whimsy in comparison.
Even though the materiality of sculpture had drawn me, it may emerge that materiality is subversive and the hardware is happy to play second fiddle.
This notion is useful to the blog reader then, who does not need to witness, first hand, ‘Sculpture in The Sky’.
Is this the beginning?
Hard to know where we are, in history. Is this the beginning? Is it the middle? Is this the end?
We have arrived here in Wamboin, seemingly a perfect place, in terms of air and space and light, but in reality, the place is a mess on the way to ruin.
The landscape is recovering from a hundred years of grazing degradation. The previous owner made good repair with planting and the ground has somewhat recovered. Many trees were planted in the last thirty years which were not native to the area. Grasses were planted that were likewise not native. A considerable amount of earthmoving in the early 90’s distributed the rain water to parts that were not were not accustomed to it. There’s plenty of rain recently but the dams aren’t filling. Weeds abound. The land reeks of confused attitudes. We have now arrived and begun to apply our set of values which may be equally out of line within a deeper history.
The land is asset rich but broken.
An artwork may be applied to a finished place, where all the above arguments had been settled. An artwork would underscore that ‘finished’ picture.
Given that finishing the work of repair will take another hundred years, all work here is propositional and not conclusive. All artwork is applied to shifting sand and shifting meaning.
Overhead power lines run along the bottom edge of the block. Beyond the lines, 2000 acres wait to be developed. This part of the property exists in the present but sits in the future’s long shadows.
Fence Detail 1984 & 2019
Fence Detail enjoys, describes the way in which fencing wire attaches to a fencing post. The wire stops briefly at the post on its way somewhere, having come from somewhere else. It’s one of many posts in a line describing the edge of land, separating two ‘parcels’ of land from each other. We do it here, on our land to know where we stand and where others shouldn’t.
The sculpture is an accidental account of where it finds itself. The imagery is naturally compatible with the overhead power lines which accidentally ‘over line’ the boundary. The power lines, due to their function, cannot start and stop as they are able to do in the sculpture.
None the less, there is a conversation which makes the sculpture feel and look at home.
While there is conversation, there is hope for life.
We’re trying to resuscitate the place.
The works here document the condition of the land, it’s recovery and or further ruination. The placed works constitute a diary of our presence for better or worse.
This place, like like places is a metaphor for our time and describes where we stand.
Train and Fence
Fence Detail (Detail)
