Published

Published! The thrill of opening the package with my books in print.

It’s always a thrill to see your name in print or your art on a wall. There’s that sense of looking at yourself from the outside . Here is the proof of your creative efforts, a small pinnacle of achievement, a resolution of ideas.

Self publishing has revolutionised ways that poets and authors can see their name in print. It is also a fantastic way to create a printed catalogue of your art project. It’s a printed portfolio, that extra step you can take to document your work and keep it on your bookshelf.

I started doing this when I had my first major solo exhibition of 365 collages created each day for a year. I uploaded these artworks to a blog every day and wrote a couple of sentences about what each collage was about. Then when they were accepted for an exhibition, I created 12 small square books, one for each month which were exhibited with the collages. They provided an opportunity for people to read about the art as well as look at the artworks on the wall.

This project Art of Place | Pottsville is a 13 minute film and book about the urban bush and wetlands around Pottsville in northern New South Wales where I live. It has not only helped me appreciate the complex biodiversity of place in my own locale, but also given me a passion to protect this remnant bushland and all those other than human species who inhabit it.

The project started as a film about five biodiverse sites in Pottsville within a four kilometre radius of each other. At each site I created art responding to the place and filmed its making. This involved working “in collaboration” with nature through frottage ‘rubbings’ of the bark on trees, immersing papers in sand, mud or water and allowing shadows and lines of plants to reveal their own images.

Some papers were handmade, some transparent, some had also survived a previous flood and were already stained with mud. I knew from that flood experience that paper as a material was both fragile yet resilient. Some papers fell to pieces as I worked with them but were reassembled to form new narrative images. Some papers survived even the effects of wind and tide. They became metaphors of hope in troubled times.

The results of my creations are now in both the film and more permanently accessible, in the book . One copy of the book has also been sent to England for the group exhibition at Dartington in Devon as the final project for my MA Arts and Place. The short video will be shown on a screen in the gallery as well as being shown at a special film screening and artist talk in the Pottsville Environment Centre in January.

Once the images of the film fade from memory, the book becomes a ‘freeze frame’ of my favourite moments. Those images on paper retain the essence of each of the five sites, the sounds heard and smells experienced there. For people encountering this on the other side of the world, it will bring a completely different perspective to creating art “in place”.

My book will represent me even when I am not able to be physically in person for my exhibition in Devon. It will be an ambassador for this tiny portion of an environment that is home to many endangered species. It is a reminder of our interconnection with plants and animals, water and soil that are essential to our life on earth. In protecting our environment, we future proof our own life on earth.

Exhibition flyer for our MA Arts & Place group exhibition in Dartington, Devon UK in January 2024.