We are not accustomed to being surveilled by the moon. Here it was though clearly looking now, with its monocle or magnifying glass.
An iridologist could interpret the moon’s health tonight. A smear of cloud gave no clues to me.
The moon keeps an eye on everyone, not just me, but not tonight.
This moon sat in the sky in judgement.
Yes. I’m talking to you.
Judge me then Moon. You have no power to sentence me.
Judge away. xx
The croo
I’m not a misanthropist but, the kangaroos sit better than humans among the sculptures. People here to replace the kangaroos would not be as integrated. The presence of people would take away the alien charm.
Covid studo
The studio is expanded now, here at Wamboin. There is no normal workshop/studio.
The raw material here is my life’s work. Making now is looking and moving works around. Old is new. Time and the notion of progress are just colours and brushes.
Changing a work by physically altering it is not available, not an option, so, thinking and time is repurposed.
The 20 acres have become the work space, Because my thinking is oriented towards an art practice, everything is processed through that aperture.
The 20 acres constitute the boundary of the gallery and or the one artwork, which in my day, I travel across and alter. Being that it is a desert here, all human, western human change is folly, so, as I walk through the landscape I keep that in mind.
The tools employed are limited. There is no earth moving machinery on site. That has to be separately expensively commissioned. There is my truck with crane. There are the trees and the earth, the grass and the leaves.There are bricks left by the previous owner. There is the weather, there is my energy, rising and falling.
There are the usual miss-hits, mistakes, poor judgements. There is the usual dependence on those with greater intelligence and judgement.
For all of that, life is the same, here at Wamboin. Important work, it feels like, brought here to us by Covid. There’s moving stuff, which is like remaking stuff and there’s photographing stuff which identifies that. The record may come to be useful.
The Commonwealth Abyss 2010?
Peripheral Core
Shared red and white elements do not necessarily denote significance unless drawn out by a reading.
The Reading.
The white of the apple was applied through eating by a child’s teeth. Having made the ribbon, the apple had lost its appeal and been discarded into the gutter where it drew attention to itself by being so well drawn. It looked like a wheel, ready to roll itself away to the sea.
The cable off-cut, from being peeled revealed red, not white. This was a ribbon laid out, not rolled up. The appeal lay in the prospect of finding a match at the electrical store, the smaller, unpeeled sample was clearly not a match.
Finding a link is to reconcile having moved to Wamboin. The apple was in Balmain. The cable was a Wamboin. I am mending the break between the two places by bringing them together here.
wamboin full moon
These photos were taken tonight on the arena. The so-called arena was named by the previous owner, who kept horses. The name sticks well.
Blessed 2004 & 2019
Hole In One 1987
Column detail
Gavel 2015
Tonight there is a full moon. This phone/camera does not discriminate between night and day. It sees like a native animal, none of which were out tonight. We were too early for them.
The Crossing 2016
The sculptures continue to be reinterpreted at different times. The moonlight was strange. It lent a different light by which we will become accustomed, as we adapt to non-urban life.
The trees jostle and dance and compete for attention with the sculpture. They are more circumspect during daylight.
Split Column 1987
Gum
A photo will present visual material to the viewer that can be interpreted. If a text is added below or above that image, the viewer’s interpretation of the image may change. If the text is compelling, the image will be enhanced. It may be so enhanced that the text will become primary with the image playing a supportive role as if that image was merely explanatory or exemplary. This is a test.
Gum
This is a gum tree. The clouds are the tree’s leaves. Silver, black and blue, we squint as we do when we look at things here. Eyes wide open draw flies and cataracts.
The branches are summarised, require no elaboration.
The tree salutes to no rank and stands at a ragged attention. Shade here is psychological but welcome.
Roadkill
Roadkill
We are the roadkill capital of Australia here at Wamboin. There’s fresh kill every 100 metres. You get used to it, or not.
Root bowls from the pines line our drive, providing an avenue of dishonour.
They comprise a vegetarian equivalent to the the open road roadkill. They make the same gruesome gestures as the roos do, when they are knocked off their feet.
Wamboin Postcard 27.4.20
On the hill
Every photo provides an interpretation of a work. This blog shows the same sculptures in different lights, in different skies from different angles and distances.
We are Only As Good as The Thing of which We are A Part.
ThE pIne’s afterglow
Fire lit trees with stars
Normally nothing competes with the stars in terms of scope. Scope and the universe have have the market cornered.
Here though, the embers from the toxic pines are bright enough to make a fake day effect and the stars are caught with their pants down.
The accidental revolution
Lazy will
Dark light
We have night here. The city has no night, only the end of day. In town, night is the absence of light. Here, night is dark star light.
Yes. It’s a lot to digest
Digesting Coming here 23.4.20
We came here to Australia and disrupted a very stable culture and now we have to digest it. It took us a while to realise what we did. We were so occupied with our own intent, we failed to see what was here.
Sky
Wamboin sky 22.4.20
Sometimes the sky is so far away, you don’t recognise it. It’s far but close, insinuates itself. It has meaning but you have no language to decipher it, no ancient language, only new stuff, make believe to cover ignorance.
It’s more beautiful than I can contemplate. Not too beautiful. I don’t hide from it as I might have done before.
This sky is not made from what it is. It is not what I know it to be. That is a ruse. This sky is furrowed earth, mottled milk. It is stroking, tender, endless love.
It is essentially a sunny day and this blue is textured, bleeding. The sky has veins.
God was useful to help explain how scale is so capable.
Being that we are looking up at it, this is an underbelly. It is vast and private at the same time. Big intimacy.
A blue sky is not a distant thing. Flat blue is friendly and space less. This sky shows how far back the screen is, to remind us how big the room. I would normally call out to test the acoustics but I think my voice may not cut the mustard today.
No heed
I pay no heed to the miracles around me as I plough the land with my thinking. If I am bailed up by something bigger, then, I am reduced.
Engraved wood.
A Bridge too far
You can make a crossing elegantly, employing the materials at hand. A nick at either end of the banana locks onto the bowls giving voice to the banana’s natural arch.
Breakfast Bridge 21.4.20
pm Bridge
The pine logs lacked the banana’s elegance but employed a similar locking with the trees that the bowls provided for the banana.
pm Bridge
.
I have no regard for the pine logs. They are tainted by my wider views. I go about my day putting the landscape into shape according to my fixations.
I keep an open mind despite those comsiderations. Their day may come tomorrow.
The rake
I couldn’t find the rake but it was there in front of me the whole time. It had more of the elegance to the earlier banana.
Clarification
One week after the three log bridge was put in place, a trip to Sydney made clear the need for clarification and simplification. The found rake had been trying to communicate.
The gnarly knobs were trimmed off to invite seating and the resulting cleaner horizontal line sits better in the landscape.
The devil
We had the pines pushed over. They were unwelcome, having grown from pine cones that had rolled in from next door.
They’d been put in a pile for burning but then burning seemed excessive so they were sifted out and left in a pile for me to interpret.
I cut the roots off them and trimmed the branches off. I would find somewhere for the poles. The root bowls would be trucked up the hill to be used to limit erosion.
These are matter of fact tasks. The farmer is not obliged to interpret actions taken. Actions are purpose driven.
The pine tree grows and the ground beneath it is sterilised, so that no life can grow under its canopy. The pine tree pushes other life forms away, whether from shyness, or determination to overwhelm, or from being driven to become part of a single species forest, to make a family.
Their green is beguiling. Our European eyes glaze over in pine’s company. We are taken away from where we are and where we now belong. The pines will go.
Pictures help to tell a story. This story has one such aid. At the end of the day, I hoisted the decapitated root bowl into the sky to subject it to the opposite to its comfort zone.
To where the sun shines.
Flayed Bowl
The rabbit
There’s a lot of sculptural activity outside of sculpture. Winter’s solace arrived today. Iron bark from Armidale surely can’t be sustainable, but those anxieties are luxuries for the time being.
The delivery here has been successfully executed. The tilted tray is an inevitable expression of that success. The scale of it in relation to my body size, the ‘tilt’ which is so stability averse, why is the clean emptiness so fulfilling? These aspects cannot be described more successfully than being ‘sculptural’.
Can we reasonably ascribe such a term to sculpture also, without offending sculpture’s scope?
Hopefully, yes we can. We may discuss sculpture simultaneously with its sculptural aspects and not inhibit its relevance.
To put it in a nutshell though, it is the verticality of the suspended hanging plate that establishes such a lasting relationship with the ground, fleeting as it is, was.
The Rabbit
One
One log. One fire. One shed. One life.
Let’s not get complicated.
Who needs to fall under the spell of a multi-logged fire. Jagged dancing flames and red caverns you can walk through in your imagination.
No thanks. Just the one log for now.
One log. One fire. One shed. One life is more than enough.
i like a blanket rule. No discussion shall be entered into. Life is simple. One. One. One. One.
The fireplace is not tv. It’s not a screen. There is no alternative life offered here. This is the middle of nothing. This is a no escape options fire tonight.
One Log
A Monolog
Postcard from Wamboin easter sunday
Tower detail
Fire 2010
The Interior
Bowl 12 2011 and Me 1983
First Ciming
The long bow
This blog consists of speculations. I employ a long bow to approach subjects and the targets are therefore difficult to reach.
I am employing that long bow here.
Covert was made in 2006. When you make a work, you are guided by the ideas you have, the material, and your subconscious. You imagine you can steer a work with your intent, but mostly you have to let the work drive itself, in order to manifest any control of its parts.
Covert was made in response to an aspect of my life at that time which was hidden and manifest simultaneously.
Covert now exists inescapably in relation to Covid and prior (imagined) significances drop away.
Now, we are so transfixed by Covid, that Covid is everything and everywhere.
Covert advertises Covid.
Hidden and invisible, Covid has insinuated itself into every part of our life. We obey its instruction. It is irresistible.
Covert 2006
A work is made in the moment in which it was literally manufactured. Then it remakes itself as history sheds new light on it and is made again.
During Covid, I am happy not to make new work as old works around me are remade outside of my will and effort.
As the world changes, so does the work change.
A work can exist in darkness, to virtually not exist at all, and then suddenly be brought to life by a new light shed on it.
Covert 2006 - 2020
The long bow is employed for distant targets, possibly by equestrians? I might have used a different weapon or no weapon at all. I could have let the work sit there, in the patch on which it sits. I could have let thIs moment of light slip past, without acknowledgement. I always believed this work had some merit. I was doing something I hadn’t done before. There is a ‘sculptural’ aspect is this work that some of my works lack.
Covert 2006 - 2020
Time provides an opportunity to look at work from different angles. New angles emerge over time.
Long live the long bow.