‘Filaments’, Schoolhouse Gallery, Rosny 2023
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Viral Autonomy
I have seen David Fooks perform beautiful ambient music as Stormworm a few times and have been deeply impressed by his sensitivity to sound. He is a synth master with a very considered approach to composition. It seemed very much like what was being evoked in his music was very much the sum of his life, that there was a sense of all time at once in the soundscapes. Our meeting for this project was our first in depth conversation and it went straight into the deep very naturally and with a lot of common territory. Such as growing up feeling like an outsider whilst having a deep connection to land and its patterns. A love of 80s cultural ambience, the intrinsic glow and believable fantasy realms that so much culture from that epoch evokes. The sense of spinning out from childhood was very present in our conversation, that early loves have kept on evolving out into new forms. So I tried to make this piece evocative of sound as landscape with a sense of grand cinema to it whilst keeping the touchstone of childhood in the foreground. At one point I asked if he held a specific animal-guide sense of himself, if there was a resonant animal that was of recurring influence. He said not a specific one, rather a generalised entity of the primal instinct. I tried to represent that with a sense of spiritual presence cascading through the eyes of him as a child into a dissipating colour field. An energy that flows back into the land and cycles through time, a force borne of experience but making itself known as sounds reverberation.
Gelatinous Cube
This work was generated through discourse with Richie Cyngler. He is a musician and artist with a huge skill set. He is someone who sees the other side of most things, that every thesis has its antithesis, every idea its opposite. Very much a free-thinker connected to a vast ocean of influences. These range from role-playing games to open-source coding. To name but a few. I guess in many ways this process has been about going beyond surface modes of engaging and collaborating with each other and trying to honour the scale of cosmology we hold as individuals. With Richie though there is such a depth to his mind it was a real challenge to limit content. I ended up making an epiphanic experience with rave culture the taproot of the piece. It gave a sense of non-dualistic choreography between thought and sound that I really resonated with. Onto that base structure I attached implications of working with code and chance factors borne of some of our conversation around role-playing games. I tried to make the whole piece feel like a kind of infinite landscape that reflects his own mytho-poetic intellectualism. That there could be a new narrative around the corner at any moment in the picture plane, the eyes travel is a choose your own adventure. We share a deep love of the graphic novel world and its imaginative forces. He was recently renewing an interest the Marvel character multiple man and it seemed apt to represent Richie as a character that can make multiple versions of himself as that is something he does in life. Repeating and extending self into many realms. The title of the work ‘Gelatinous Cube’ refers to a character from D & D I was previously unaware of, a cube life-form that absorbs and digests other characters. It seemed an apt symbol for someone that really takes on the life-energy of his fascinations and embodies concepts like an internal code.
Ray
To further my increasing connection to the West Coast this image is borne of dialogue with Raymond Arnold, a well-known and respected artist who has put a lot into furthering Queenstown as an artist conducive destination. We sat down for a coffee at Press West, an old school that has been converted into a quite accessible print-making facility by Raymond and the art community there. To me he has a very punk-ethos that has spent a life time pursuing artistic vitality. We discussed the common ground of both having signwriters for fathers, the tins of paint held in the hand alongside the ever-faithful mahl stick that gives the signwriters hand precise support. A sense of how we remake ourselves with the inheritance of influence we are given really drove this piece, how we are expressive continuums of our environments input. We discussed the complexities of the father-son relationship and I allude to this with an image of his father below Raymond as a boy in his bedroom. Early contact with paint at ship-builders yards sits alongside boats at a Franklin River protestors blockade. We discussed his role in the Franklin-Gordon protests as a history in collective solidarity, a heated and joyful resistance to industries anachronistic approach to land that he was formatively involved in. This love of land as a deep muse for the artist made itself known in many ways over our conversation. Raymond’s recent entry into the Hadley prize is forged by one of his many jaunts into the hills of Queenstown on a pushbike. He is an artistic elder and this determination to sweat his way up the hills speaks volumes about his dedication to authentically experiencing form. I felt one of the strongest stylistic influences in making this piece, the cross-hatching and level of detail was a deliberate attempt to occupy some element of his print-making style and dedication to forms majesty.
Jacob’s Ladder
This piece is borne of conversation with Jacob Leary. I have admired his practice for some time, the work ethic in his assemblages has left me quietly blown away. I reached out specifically for this project and he was very approachable and kind hearted towards art as community. His studio was the perfect nest for absorbing some sense of his story, a stunning field of debris made up of new and old works which gave a sense of glorious productivity. The pieces took on a sense of self-organising growth, as though some invisible magnetic force was compelling all of the bits to re-assemble and continually extend themselves out with a sense of autonomous development. Over the course of our talk I gathered that he is very much an explorer seeking a free and authentic mode of exploring reality. We recurringly came back to a sense of democratic inclusion in his materiality, a notion that anyone can access his work and find something, that the ‘everyday’ materials he uses resist any notion of kitsch and are in fact more egalitarian. Spinning out from this I decided to rather than try and do a complex symbolic map of the broad content we covered I would instead re-assemble his assemblage with very little of my own cartography in the process. Jacob expressed an interest in selfless representation and I spun that out through trying to let the work speak for itself all over again through drawing. In our interaction he very much cast a figure that was enthusiastic about the value of being immolated by studio practice. He clearly possesses a well-researched narrative about his work but I got the feeling that the liminality and intangible open-endedness of pursuing making was a dominant passion. His process occupies a state of self-generative logic that is constantly adapting to its own feedback. I simply tried to plug in to that sense of an autonomous object composed of many parts and timelines and tried to position such dimensionality through a different medium.
The Queen
The mysterious entity that is the West Coast definitely has a complex personality of its own. Sharing a conversation with land is obviously a bit more obtuse and non-verbal than the other works in this show but very relevant to me. Queenstown itself is about as idiosyncratic a place as I have ever seen, with toxic residue from industry sitting alongside vast wilderness. A place scooped out by industry with regeneration insisting on change everywhere. It certainly speaks with its own voice and like a good friendship I always feels vastly calmer and more connected to generative energies and old deep time after being there. I have always appreciated the intrinsic relationship between landscape and memory, how our internal relationship affects how we view landscape. Some people visit the west and feel a deep belonging, others feel like it’s terrifying and natures isolation will consume them in a second. It’s a fascinating reflection on how the act of building ideology affects how much of the land we can truly see, our vision is its scale of presence to a degree. This drawing lays out a reworked mural from the centre of town, I have taken its basic shapes and refilled the content. There is an eroding sense of the past at the bottom of the picture plane with an emerging state of flux growing out of histories soil. It’s an exciting time for the west, various structures are playing out how the identity of the area will represent itself to the world. Personally I hope it becomes a robust artist mecca, one that transcends rhetoric and becomes a vital art town in a very real sense. The top of this image reflects that hope for new future possibilities that provide deep sanctuary from the ‘future shock’ of modern life.
Fire & Ice
Nick Iceton is one of my oldest friends in Tasmania. We met when I brought my music gear from Adelaide and needed a place to rehearse some very loud music. He was living in an old apple shed in Cygnet that provided the perfect architecture. Our friendship grew as he was carving wood while listening to our rowdy doom pop. Since then I have grown to know him as a deeply attuned person with a real ability to dwell with nature as a permeable teacher. He works as an art therapist, using the creative life to guide people into deeper understandings of themselves. This enterprise is called ‘seedwings’ and says a lot about both his make-up and the drawing. As on old friend our chat was brief and brought up a dream image of a translucent, half coloured wheel that was half rainbow and half submerged underground. I played with that and extended it into an underground of many rooms. The rooms contain references to his own archetypes, the joker, the mask-maker and the scholar find a position. Also some shared experience, such as a bat with its tongue stretched out that refers to a time he was administering some drum healing to me on a cold winter solstice night and a bat flew past us. The owls are included because his interactions with birds are always symbolic and deeply considered. We have gone through a lot together and the complex rock underground refers to this gradual building and repetition of shared experience and how many pages are left to turn.
Wizard at Work
For those that don’t know Pete Mattila he is a local blacksmith with a deep connection to the arts and the land, in particular its history and healing. This piece really spoke itself into being. With a certain chaos magic in fact. I bumped into him at officeworks and organised to go straight over to his workshop, with no prior plan to include him in this show. We got straight into a discussion about responsibility, how individual hand/mind integrity decides if we are making something that is either creative or destructive. The praxis of how we use our hands naturally made itself into the centre of the work. He showed me a ring that through stages of chemical alchemy had been composed from the copper sludge from the tailings that have colonised the Queen River. Making art from waste in an incredible poetry. The easiest summary of this piece though is that Pete is his own embodiment, he has been in profound communication with his materials and philosophy for so long that there is only a tiny separation between him and his work. He lives in symbiosis with his workshop and evidence of his embodiment is found in all the various tools and artefacts there, every component felt so heavily used it was like his essence had been hammered into the metal on a molecular level. Each strike seems to refine his being so I tried to keep this piece lean and elegant, something with a precise sense of its own meaning.
Primal Outlaw
This one’s a cheeky little self-portrait. After all I’m an artist and have a reasonable amount of self-knowledge to work with. It was made in the early stages of this project while I was renovating in Queenstown and needed some art making to keep me grounded. Drawing is a very transportative thing for me, the sense of travelling while sitting still. The influence of comic books dynamic compositions looms largely. In particular the aesthetic tendency to network in a flowing stream of information. Sci-Fi was and remains a big deal for my inner landscape. Doctor Who is fiddling with time and the star ship Enterprise is boldly charting the edges of the paper. The TARDIS busily yanks up cryptic messages from the ground while the Phantom dances with a snake that’s writing music. The more heroic narratives of sci-fi has been a big player in my personality. In this work these stories enmesh with the misty landscape of Queenstown, with portals embedded in the mountains to remind me of life beyond serious trade work.
The Kinsman
Adam Kinsman has been a dear and kindred friend of mine since I met him at the Qbank residency in Queenstown 2021. His kindness has become an invaluable treasure in my life. He has a giant-sized heart and a keen connection to reading nature as a living text. He approaches everything with a vital dynamism, like the last moment could burn out at any second. When we hang out together we weave a thousand thoughts onto a loom at supernova speeds. This energy reflects his travel through life. One deeply influenced by being a professional skater. The cinematic bounce through concrete jungles is an inertia that he has never lost. All energy changes state and his has flowed into building life in Queenstown after travelling the world as a skater. Music is an intrinsic friend, he listens to loud and brutal styles like sweet lullabies for the soul, losing himself in the exchange. Like a lot of people involved in this project, influences are more like tattoo’s on the mind’s eye, effigies that grow with and around the personality. This piece includes reassembled versions of some of his tattoos and is the only work where the drawing itself was collaborative. He is a great artist with a history in street art and he did the flowing typography at the bottom of the piece which I then stretched out the root system to enclose and connect all the elements of the drawing. I think Adam is a great testifier to a theme that runs all the way through this body of work; that joy comes when the individual process of combining the conscious and unconscious mind has developed to its own unique path.
Mountain Man
This was done for an old friend, Brett Walter, who that lives in Canada now. He told me of a dream of being merged into a mountain. We used to play music together so I littered the scene with music references. He works in film making props and effects so I put in some modified versions of his work there, recreating some of the scenes. There is a very fluid and imaginative prose to his mental architecture, he was always telling stories and making little animations, bubbling away with new ideas constantly. This stream of creative energy made this a very fluid work that evolved and changed shape many times as it was being completed.
Nature’s Internet
This work is the genesis of this project in ways. Whilst figurative it isn’t a part of the inner portraiture approach specifically. Instead it’s the first drawing work I did that is describing a character using a language of dense networking. Inspired by my experiences as a mushroom farmer and amateur mycologist this work is a homage to the communicative powers of mycorrhizal networks in a forest. Recent research is finding that fungus stores up to a third of our carbon emissions. The fungal world is certainly an exemplary demonstration of symbiosis, of how transformative collaboration is. The knowledge of these underground networks transporting nutrition to where it is most needed and playing a vital and up until recently unrecognised role in a healthy ecology is something that has changed the direction of my art practice. I have always been keen to use everything and waste nothing. In this the fungal world became my muse. Fungal digestive enzymes and their power to transform decomposing matter and toxic waste into edible fruit bodies is one of the most inspiring lessons from nature I have ever gathered. And this drawing is kind of universal to me, an anonymous figure surrounded by natural systems that we are completely dependent upon.