Uncertain Change

Landslide (detail) 2025 - artist book in wooden box

“The Only Constant in Life Is Change.”- Heraclitus. 

I used to be very afraid of change. If it’s not broke, don’t fix it was my motto. Yet now I see how uncertainty creates a sense of freedom that allows you to embrace change.

This is especially true in my art. I’ve found that when something looks kind of finished but isn’t quite there yet, it may need to radically change in order for the best idea to emerge.

It happened in my studio this week when my scroll book suddenly emerged from its chrysalis state. I had cut up a painting of stones which I made while at my artist residency in Oatlands, Tasmania last year. I loved the stones inspired by the many stone walls and the fireplace at the residency.

These stones felt like they needed to be moving. They harked back to the stone stories I was creating in Iceland influenced by the landslide at Seyðisfjörður, East Iceland in December 2020. 

I glued the two strips of painted stones back to back onto a strip of watercolour paper to create a scroll book. Then I got stopped in my tracks as I couldn’t work out how to make the stones come alive. I let the unfinished work sit on my studio desk for a few days until I approached it again.

I rolled and folded the paper, only to realise that the folds needed stitching. Once stitched, the book sprang to life as a series of rolling folds. When finished the whole set of folds rolled up to fit beautifully in a wooden teabag box I had picked up at the local opportunity shop.

I thought of the stones and how landslides bring stones to the earth, shattering them into smaller pieces. How small stones over time become eroded, adding to the soil composition. How everything in the world is in a constant state of movement and flux.

I’ve been reading about trees and forests. Trees, like stones, we consider immobile and fixed, yet they carry their own change and transformation within them. Stones are pounded by the sea or smoothed by rivers, they tumble in landslides, pool with water, become weathered into different shapes, changing over deep time.

Trees migrate through seed dispersal and root entanglements; they fall down and decay to become hosts for moss, fungi and wood boring creatures.

Change promotes growth and transformation. Why ever did I worry so much about it in my youth, wanting things to remain the same. Like death and taxes, the only thing certain in life is change. Uncertain change is even more exciting; nothing can be predicted, there is no fixed outcome, all possibilities can exist simultaneously.

In these times of constant uncertainty, of war and famine, of politics and power play; we as artists can respond through creating works which celebrate change as holding possibilities as yet unknown. On my studio window-ledge is a little strip of paper I screenprinted more than 10 years ago. It reads “a hopeful future”. It’s my talisman in times of uncertain change.

Landslide 2025 -artist scroll book opened out