Current Project: Hillsides and Riverlands

What is landscape? I live in a region full of different sorts of beauty, where bushlands surround a city founded in the destructive scramble of the gold rush.  Not far away from where I live is a high rocky mound that remains a hill even after its reduction by the heavy historic impacts of gold mining. It was dug into, altered and scarred, but it retains its own aura, under the sky. It is a place where I regularly walk. Black Hill was an epicentre of Australia's nineteenth-century gold rush and played a role in the global history of extractive activities and attitudes that saw nature merely as a human resource. Even now, Black Hill is primarily known as a recreational space. Imagining and understanding its continuing story, above and below ground is a focus of my art about this environment. 

Adjacent to this hill runs the Yarrowee River, which, like many other local watercourses, was heavily  impacted by the industrial activities of gold mining, and the building of a city founded in that era. Efforts continue to be made to repair the river's health. Artworks here record its present character, traces of its past, and its emergence as a watercourse tended and surrounded by regrowth.

These riverland works are about the river as a residue of its lost self, as a survivor, coming through old and new pollution, silting up, clogging up, being cleaned up, miraculously continuing to live and flow. Sometimes the style and texture evident in these works references conventional landscapes, but they include acknowledgement of transience and the struggle that has gone on along the rivers. Often these works allow pigments to split and settle in water, to run like silt, to evoke the tangling of undergrowth and other natural processes in such environments. 

These works are created on Arches watercolour paper (300gsm), using mixed media, including charcoal, rock and earth pigments, watercolour, and gouache - in ways that set out to evoke landscape as a material, living entity and an intricate place of elemental process. They are priced unframed, but framing can be arranged at extra cost.