TOPOGRAPHIA
2008 - 2009
The effects of time and human intervention on land, and in particular, the Australian landscape, including the arid region where South Australia, Northern Victoria and New South Wales meet, have preoccupied my practice for the past fifteen years.
The long view, embedded in my earliest childhood memories, initially from the window of the family car, includes lush farmland, wide river crossings and then, the inexorable inland desert.
Deserts in themselves have come to mean much for me: not only the view, but a sense of being in a place of significant and ancient history.
My more recent concern with the view from above has led me back to my earlier roots in abstraction: a place where I can play endlessly with the form laid out before me.
Now, global positioning systems enable cultivators to design and follow a plan, make perfect angles, and rearrange nature to fit in with agri-business, depending on available water. Grid upon grid, crop rotation and seasonal shifts form gauze-like patterns over the ancient sea bed.
The aesthetics of industry: the practical agricultural built form, along with the classic dam and channelled pipeline, connect with earlier, less precise markings.
A track or fence line cling precariously to remnant vegetation against the prevailing winds, reminding me of the early Constructivists and the Abstractionists of the 60’s.This current body of work includes references to more recently introduced crops, GM or not, and also to the resultant salination, which occurs when shallow crops are repeatedly inflicted on the fragile surface of an already challenged land.
Intense pinks, clays and ochres rise from below in contrast to the unnatural acid greens and yellows of new crops. The use of multiple applications of dripped or poured pigment gives the paintings a translucent quality, and manages to convey the sense of scarification and layering that is present in the cultivated landscape.
