Dear reader

Dear blog reader,

This blog and I, enjoy some readership. You are not so numerous that at any one time you are most likely the only reader.

Its not a one to one, but almost as good with one to none, with my speaking and your being interested, annoyed, curious, aroused very silently.
It is the privilege of the blogger who can reflect without interruption. The reader is not required to feign interest if they are not interested. They are able to leave at any time. It is a convenient non-relationship.
You the reader though IS able to respond, should you be tempted. Your immaculate silence is optional.
It is a new feature of the blog that readers can like a post, please don’t, or they can make a comment. As the ‘blogger’, I am able to approve the ‘publication’ or not of the comment, should it be rude or advertorial.
To this day I have received 2 comments both of which were approved by me, but have not been published.
It’s a work in progress.

CItiesstriveonstress

Stress hurts the individual, endangers the health of them. Bad for those with whom those individuals come into contact. Everyone gets stressed. Contagious, like other stuff.
For the city though, it can’t get enough, stress. Like petrol, makes the individual rev. A bunch of revheads can make an organisation sing, make a city sing.
Stress empowers striving, reaching, pushing to attain the impossible dream.
Actually, we’re coming to the end of this 200 year experiment. It’s too hard. Achievements don’t stick for long. The sparkle tarnishes fast.
Everything in town is a tip in waiting.
Stressjustmakesamess.

Three

Three trees

Three black wattles have died young. Wattles’ lives have varying lengths. They die or survive for unknown reasons.
Their waving here is young and full of the promise of a future life which turns out was a lie.
They wave and the sky provides an accompaniment as if the clouds were life’s vapours.

They died together, went down as one, companions more in their death than their life.
Three conjures significance as if a story is embedded. Even without knowledge of religion, the scene has a biblical resonance. ‘They gave their lives for us.’

The three trees make a unit. There is a compelling unity. They separate themselves from the landscape, when the rule of the landscape is that nothing can be separated from the whole. No one thing shall be idolised is the rule here, at Wamboin, here in Australia, here in the world and yet?

Wamboin postcard a new take

Photos kindly provided here show a different take on Wamboin.

Detail of The Interior 1990. Photo: Anne Murray

Detail The Interior 1990. Photo: Anne Murray

The blurred middle

Plug half full

An inverted plug in the basin at Wamboin speaks of a plug half full and half empty.

We live in a shed here at Wamboin. To keep warm we have built in an insulated, heatable corner with bed, couch, tv and computer.

This has become the indisputable’inside’. Building it made what was previously inside more like outside, without the the wind and rain. We now call this place we cook and spend most of our time ‘midside’. ‘Midside’ is a very particular place, both inside and outside.

We have coined a companion word, (like ‘frile’, I expect, which was already coined*), which also describes this space, which is the ‘midterior’. Being that these between spaces are being widely cultivated by architects, this word ‘midterior’ would be well employed if it has not been coined.

The world was a simpler place when it could be divided between interior and exterior. The ‘interior’, ‘inside’, had provided protection from predators and a ‘wild’ nature. The exterior was a place to which one escaped and was also naturally more at risk.

Now danger and safety are indiscriminate about where they manifest their natures.

The plug was used to hold water from going away, it is here poised, hesitant, wondering about its purpose.

Language is becoming quite leaky. The basin is a leaking vessel.

• See earlier blog, ‘The Frile’.

Plinth

The form work

Having abandoned the plinth, as we were required to do, as serious sculptors, it is with some trepidation and anxiety too, to make a plinth to better show a work.

Formwork filled

It is only a workmanlike task after all, nothing to dwell upon, or take to heart. There is no scope for a more complicated relationship. It is material. To be placed in order, one step following another, no more than walking.

Like making a cake, or a bed, the satisfaction of stepping back to be able to declare the job done. It is not a shame to smother a sculpture on it, for which it was designed.
It is not.

Mattress of concrete

The Fountain

The 2020 Fountain

It’s hard to come up with a fountain.
Duchamp took the fountain past water.
It was the race to the last full stop and Duchamp seemed to have won. But could water find scope in a new sentence?

Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ describes the absent urine, the water going in, rather than coming out. You could only imagine it though. There was room for just the one stream, It’s the idea of water, yellow. Romanesque. Bigger suddenly with the imagined participant standing nearby. You almost have to stand back, avert your eyes.

Not trying to make a fountain helps. Drilling into a steel plate seems innocuous, while installing a shelf in the tool shed. When the drill breaks through into the ground though, and finds the water pipe with twenty acres available, that’s something to which one takes notice.

That water should be now coming out of the ground, someone pissing from the grave, seemingly, it can’t be ignored, dismissed as merely astonishing or funny.

This happened today, immediately after watching a documentary on the Louis 14th’s fountains at Versailles.

The above photo shows a moment in the life of the fountain. A video may have brought more of the liveliness of the fountain, but video is not available in this blog format.

Wamboin postcard

Blood in the gully

and

Unknown sculpture. C.1987 Retrieved 2020

Sydney postcard

July sky

Sydney’s like London, a carbon copy when carbon was ok.
Yes. It does have a different climate, and sky. We always imagined the distance and difference vast, but no. It’s the same mismatch of pre-industrial, industrial and and post-industrial buildings separated by roads and parks and people dressed for town. It’s got the same emissions. Values are shared and also under investigation.
So flying’s off the radar, which is great. Go to Sydney and you go to London by default. Go to Sydney, go to most cities, to achieve a similar if not the same result.

Travel promises to deliver difference, exoticism. It worked well for the travel industry, but badly for the climate.

If you want to try for something different, don’t make so much money!

Careless beautiful

Architrave snagged

The length of the architrave snagged by the trees held to the truck by one rope pulled at an angle just short of breaking, constitutes carelessness on the one hand and a rare conjunction on the other, worthy of recording here.

Snagged architrave

Finely drawn white arcs reach up to connect with a dark web of lines and deny their alignment with the truck. By being both no longer part of the truck and not entirely married to the tree, they become one autonomous object.

One does not expect to encounter a ray of light by day, in this location outside the light light shop at Queanbeyan, of all places.

Before I identified the reality of the dislodged load, that’s what it was, for maybe two seconds.

I am not ready to identify that which seeks to be illuminated. The rays do appear to reach through the tangled web though, which is promising. . .

Crows nest postCard

Hayberry Street

It’s not often you get dialogue between the road and a tree. Because of the presence of the tree (in the photo above), the road marking’s shape and length become pronounced. Because of those lines, the bends in the trunk curve more strikingly.
This conversation forms the gateway to my brother’s house. It is a portal.
‘Be ready’, it says.

Reinventing the peel

There is little point going over ground already covered. Some subjects have little scope for reflection or renewal..
Peeling a banana may be one of those subjects.
Having said that, I have noticed I think quite a lot about how I peel the banana which I would like to explore.
On the one hand (sic), I attempt to peel the banana perfectly. On the other, I try to peel the banana a new way every day.

We are modelled in our peeling technique by the monkey. They hold the banana in one hand and apply the ‘peel and rotate until peeled’ technique, which leaves the peel in a hilt over the hand.
This is deeply unsatisfying. Not only do we (temporarily) lose a hand in the process of eating the banana, but also, we are obliged to eat the banana as if it had a top and a bottom and a first and last bite.
The first bite though, is similar to the last. There is no first and last bite, when the first can easily be last and vice versa. The banana needs to have its nature represented accurately.

I peel the banana by cutting the stalk end with a knife. This reduces bruising the end of the banana. I peel down until the flesh of the banana is exposed and then I peel it back towards the normal eating end. This produces not a petal the monkey makes, but a double the length of the banana peel. This is then folded back again to make which it three times the banana’s length. This can be discarded easily, in one part.
Through this technique, I reveal the banana as fully three dimensionally realised.
Its shape is liberated from not having a beginning and an end. It can be now be eaten any which way.
The monkey technique does provide an inbuilt napkin to keep the fingers from becoming sticky. Sticky fingers though is preferable to subservience.

Getting to the truth involves removing the covers, to best reveal what is hidden by the covers. In the instance of peeling the banana, the intension is to maximise the pleasure of the eating.

Old post

This post may be new today but by tomorrow it will be old. It will be old for most of its life. It will sit in the middle of the rest of the posts. It will linger in the shadows without the benefit of the screen light the latest post enjoys.

This post is old-ready.

The usual blog reader tends to be time poor, with no time to linger, to savour. The form has limits. We cannot curl up with a blog as easily as we can curl up with a book. You never hear, ‘Let’s go for a scroll’.

This post functions as a lure, to entice readers into the back catalogue of posts.

Just like the dog, having chased the kangaroos into the dam is then pulled under the water to drown, so does this post entice the reader to scroll onto the murky waters of the past, to drown. (Just kidding).

While posts tend to sit in chronological order, the newest is afforded the best advantage with the implication being that earlier posts have already been read.

I am reminded of returning to Wamboin to find unread newspapers and how compelling and chock full of absorbing stories they are When they are ‘new’, there is the uncomfortable pressure of gulping them down, to be up to date.

The idea of the old post promotes the benefits and richness of looking backwards that our culture has mostly resisted.

I am so pleased to find you here.

Beauty’s frame

Just like a sculpture needs to be hidden, to make you want to look at it, so does beauty everywhere hide. Beauty that insists on being seen, is seen through and is invisible.
The woman at Kennards who rented me the plate lifter was male in gait and in her clothing and her face was dirty. Her voice was rough, in keeping with the expectations of customers. There it was though, plain as day, the face (and body)* of an angel. She was beautiful.

Just like leaves, trees and rocks in front of a sculpture conceal it, to make you want to look, so were these layers of clothes, gait, and demeanour, covers that provided a frame to show the beauty of this woman, this person.

An image of the aforesaid person who served me at Kennards may have been useful to illustrate this idea however, its absence allows us better to imagine her (them) and her (their) **beauty.

* You normally only hear of the face of the angel, as if an accompanying body will somehow diminish the angel status.

** I am only just beginning to transplant gender specific words for gender neutral words.

SplitTing

Can’t do without matches here. Matches deliver warmth and food.
Staying warm requires firewood being split. After a time everything has the capacity to split, even the redheads through the hourglass.

Split Redheads

No surf heRe

Water emulating water elsewhere.

Water anywhere is a sponge and reproduces what lies overhead. Here it unlocks my separation from a life on the coast. Waves rushing in space emulate the way dreams can recompose the world.

Dirt

The task is to restore the grass to the top of the hill. The kangaroos have no predator, the local folk lore says, and so they multiply to the landscape’s detriment. The bald patches are starting to join.

A dam is a negative mine. They dig a hole not to take something but to put something in. When they dig the hole they scrape off the top soil and leave it in a pile next to the dam for rabbits and wombats to live in.
No one lives there any more and we wanted to make more space around the dam.
What to do with the dirt?

With the aid of earth moving machinery the big pile was made into four piles which were spread indecisively across the block by a tipper truck.
These four piles were like hills in the foreground, made to look so by having the real thing in the distance.

With the aid of a wheel barrow and my body I have spread the middle pile of soil into the bald patches where the grass is receding. They look like hills too, but not in the near distance, but the far distance, being that they are so small and spread out.

Original pile

Indecisive pile

Smallest piles

A Prayer

It’s not so much sorry. It’s, I was asleep and now I’m waking up.
The works scattered over the site here at Wamboin are landscape punctuations, which give the words of the landscape structure and sense.
They are signs. Signifiers. They are the traffic cops of their immediate community.
They are, if we were so inclined, temples, to remind you that you are in paradise, because we tend to forget.
I haven’t been to Bali, but I believe they employ similar punctuations in the landscape for similar reasons.
The works establish a connection to the landscape from which they can never be released.
Each work is a link in a chain. Any links removed cause the land to come adrift again.
The word ‘sorry’ has been debased by personal relationship squabbles. The sorrier always comes across pathetic, weak, unattractive. I seek to remain attractive and resist using the word, but I suppose I am, in a way, sorry.
We have to get it right this time. We think we tried before and failed. Why try again?

There are so many amazing aboriginal voices now, we cannot drown them out with our preconceptions. Filmmaker and chef Warwick Thornton, actor and storyteller Meyne Wyatt, playwright and comedian Nakkiah Lui, Victor Steffensen from Firesticks. These voices, these artists hold our attention with their compelling subject.
This place at Wamboin was recently called Sculpture in The Sky
It’s Sorry Country today.

Why use colour?

A neighbour at Wamboin quizzed the table at dinner.
No painter had explained why they use colour. What purpose did it serve?
A satisfactory answer would remove the pleasure of the riddle. At dinner.

Fire with green flame

Painting celebrated liberation from the brush with stained canvasses in the 1970’s. Paint was applied directly to the canvas. Colour was integrated into the material of the canvas. The photo above emulates the stained canvas.

Without the burden of subject, colour went free range. It was allowed to swell or contract. It could spread according to the volume of paint applied. Relations between colours and shapes were improvised, responding and listening to the each other, seeking out unity, harmony, clarity and pleasure.
In the instance above, the viewer is intrigued by the surprise appearance of green, uncharacteristic of fire colour. The viewer slips from the vacant pleasure of colour to anxiety about a toxic substance in the fire.

Red flames

We are pleased therefore in the second image to see employed a red, which competes with the green more compellingly. The green is more alive. It is happier and dancing more freely. It invites a companion too. A minor part, but the yellow in the top right corner makes a welcome site. We have been consumed by the pleasure and forgotten about the toxicity factor.

Green’s loss of composure

One voice in a group can fail to listen and therefore not happily integrate the other voices. Above, green rejoices at the expense of not only the other colours, but also the space of the picture has become claustrophobic. Harmony is out the window.

Happy as a button

The green here is positioned and sized to perfection. It resonates happily in the space, as happy as a button. Even despite the presence of the shadow corners!

Memo

How can I bring the richness of ‘fond remembrance’ to the present?

How can I look fondly on now, without the benefit of distance? 

Is the present such a tangled web that you can’t see through it?

With the present in the foreground, you can trip over stuff. Vigilance removes the capacity for reflection. 

The present then, lays a foundation for future reflection. A prior requirement to live for the present is now run its course. Living in the now is barren from its lack of embedded distance. 

Live for the future past.