Pause for Effect

Untitled - Work in progress 2022

If we have learned anything from the past few years, it is that crisis can lead to opportunity. That there is merit in silence, a pause, a time for reflection and examination of the way we go about our lives.

As artists there is often a feeling of compulsion to create without stopping simply for the sake of creating. Yet we also need to become discerning, to allow time for artworks and ideas to develop and mature.

I have many artworks which are in a state of pause. Projects that lie dormant in my “waiting” drawers, unresolved, needing some special spark to activate them. They are undergoing a gestation period similar to the cycle of planting; the nourishing of seeds in the dark soil, a time for germination and growth, before the flowering or harvest.

This week I extracted two of these artworks from my “waiting” drawers. I created these artworks over a year ago when I was at the BigCi artist residency in 2021.

Some of these were created in response to the bushfires of 2019/20, some had been immersed in muddy water after a spate of torrential rains which resulted in floods down the mountain. I felt they were incomplete but did not know how they could be resolved.

I have unpacked all the postcard size artworks I created on my recent travels and artists residencies. There were four small argyrotype prints I made about dissolution and regeneration. Ferns, moss and lichen envelop rocks and stone walls. Abandoned houses with cracked hearths sprout delicate tendrils of growth. When people leave, nature takes over.

These little argyrotype prints of sepia brown speak of deep ecological time. When layered as collage elements with the larger artworks, they become windows into the past or future, portals of imaginative dreaming.

My default practice of collage binds together disparate thoughts. What if solutions are not the way to approach our current crises. Perhaps it is instead about asking the right questions. How can we rethink the world and our relationship to ourselves and nature? How can we collaborate with the non-human world to gain insights into the multiverse; time, place and space that are collapsed and non linear? It is a challenge for artists to reflect on these questions through our own creative practice.

Burnt - work in progress 2022