Best Laid Plans
When Moonah Trees Walked 2025 - cyanotype on bamboo paper 29.7cm w x 21cm h
You can plan as much as you like for an artist residency, but you can’t plan for unexpected events beyond your control. All you can do is hit the ground running, work as hard as you can in the time available and hope for the best. The rest is up to fate/the gods/goddesses or the weather.
In my case it was fate showing its hand. At the end of my first week at the residency I had created the work I initially planned to make, square grids of Moonah trees framed by ink drawings of their twisted trunks. I was pleased with this initial work and ready to begin a new week afresh. Then came the dreaded lurgy.
Come Monday I was down and out in bed with the flu. I thought I had managed to fend it off before I left for Victoria and had been nursing a minor level cold all through my first week. It was a lesson in tempting fate and I ended up in bed, sneezing, coughing and suffering from debilitating headaches.
When I emerged gingerly on Wednesday it was only for short forays into the surrounding area in the car which kept me from feeling too despondent. I was surprised at where the Moonah trees were hanging on in little communities doted around the back of Tootgarook and Rye.
By Thursday I was feeling better and returned to the studio keen to experiment. As I had already fulfilled what I had planned to do, I was now free to experiment with ‘mucking around’ with cyanotype applications, swirling on the sun sensitive solution with no expectation of what the outcome might be.
Imagine my surprise when the swirl turned out to look like a portal, a window into antediluvial time when Moonah trees ‘walked’ across the bay before the seas rose and changed the landscape.
Encouraged by this experiment I tried double exposures and ‘wet cyanotype’ prints, adding washing soda and tea to selectively bleach and tone parts of the images. Some of these worked, others not so much, but it was a lot of fun trying out different techniques.
I realised that the best laid plans may be waiting to be disrupted to allow for new ideas to enter. Sometimes it takes being under the weather for the those plans to be modified. Adapting to circumstances byond our control means exactly letting go of control of the outcome. That is where the magic happens!
Trees, Sky, Sand 2025. Cyanotype and washing soda on handmade kozo paper.
