This article in the SMH summarises a feeling I got when visiting the recent Ken Unsworth show at Cockatoo Island: the island is undergoing a change – from little used post-industrial wasteland to quirky and gigantic arts venue. (It was originally a penal colony.)
Here are some photos I took when last there for the Unsworth exhibition (the first showing the huge doors to the Turbine hall, behind which were Unsworth’s installations). I look forward to visiting the Kentridge multimedia work I Am Not Me, The Horse Is Not Mine, which has recently opened there.
Addendum:
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Nineteen Caravans is a small book of photographs I took on a beautiful afternoon at Wanaka, New Zealand, in May. You can view the book on Issuu by following the link below.
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I visited the recent Picasso prints show at Rex Irwin Gallery and was taken with this lithograph, letting my eyes wander into the by-ways and nooks of the architected gardens that Picasso depicts, wondering about the energies that were driving him in those moments of making the work, and feeling joy in my journey through his scape.
Pablo Picasso
Jardins à Vallauris 1953
Lithograph on Arches
Picasso seems at times (along the bottom edge, to the right, for example) to move into a symbolic space – at other times I have the feeling of him toying with a littoral zone, between the symbolic and the visual.
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Pablo Picasso,
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In this recent Counselor Magazine article – Spirituality Around the World, Culturally Diverse Approaches to 12-Step, are thoughtful cross-denominational views of approaches to 12-Step recovery for addictions – the approaches being Islamic, Christian, Jewish and Buddhist. Here are gems from the Buddhist Rev. Koyo S. Kubose:
There is no sin in Buddhism, only ignorance. The greatest ignorance is ignorance of oneself; namely, thinking that one exists as an independent entity in the world and that everything revolves around oneself.
Liberation comes from loosening the grip of one’s self-centered and self-created existence.
Which evoke for me a poem I wrote in 2004:
wicca
perhaps one night they will take you
from your home
to a place out of doors
and in the darkness
on bare ground
before a pitch painted shed
begin to tell you who you are –
and realise something
for which even they were not ready –
that its only
that in the black shed
(its closed door hiding a mystery
terrifying even to them)
of which you are worthy
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Psychotherapy
The tragedy of the Victorian bush fires unfolds. Tales are told of people dying in ways like medieval tortures. And tales also of survivors suffering, among many other tortures, the guilt of having survived.
Listening to all this on the radio this morning I too felt infected by this guilt, and as though in some way to be absolved, made this little painting, rough and ready, the rougher the more effective, it felt, to be so absolved.
Ron Dowd
Tank Stand
acrylic on board, 2009, 30cm x 35cm
In this odd country, with its extremes of climate, we endeavour to find comfort for ourselves in the inhospitable. These windmill driven tank stands, dotted on harsh land, are for me a symbol of this, a reminder, as are these tragic events, of the conditional nature of our hold on this place.
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Gallery 4A (the Asia-Australia Arts Centre) is currently showing a rich and meditative installation called Nostalgia, by the Chinese artist Qiu Anxiong (pronounced choo anshong, I’m reliably informed).
I attended the screening of three of his animated video works (including the three-screen The New Sutra of the Mountains and the Seas based on the ancient Chinese manuscript Classic of the Seas and Mountains) in Parker Street, right next to the Gallery, last Friday night. The screening was part of the Sydney Chinese New Year Festival.
Qiu’s works in Nostalgia are meditations on times that have passed, on country and traditional Chinese ways, on industrialisation, and on pollution. He uses “brush and ink” painted scenes (over 6000 of them in this work), beautifully stitched into animations in which land and town scapes morph, animals change into other animals, and catastrophic events occur.
I saw military tanks that were also elephants, birds that were ominous helicopters, birds and landforms that become aircraft and their nautical carriers. As in any true Gestalt, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and the next day it was the whole, the felt experience that stayed with me. I was left with a profound sense of how we muddle through, individually and collectively, retaining traces of our remembered “natural” pasts.
Here’s a still from The New Sutra of the Mountains and the Seas, in Parker Street, on a warm Sydney evening, with Chinatown buzzing. The film’s haunting sound track was embellished by the periodic tings-tings of the nearby light rail cars sliding past down Hay Street.
In the Gallery, you can still get to see another video work, Flying South (2006), and the installation Nostalgia upstairs.
Here’s a sequence of stills from the 9 minute work Flying South, which I watched several times. It’s a poignant work from this accomplished artist.
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Qiu Anxiong
We Australians are often disparaging about Canberra – the large federal buildings “like white tombstones in the sun”, someone recently suggested to me. But I like visiting there, and whenever we go to the NSW South Coast we always take the inland route – as we did on our recent Christmas trip.
Canberra bakes silently at Christmas – everyone flees to the coast – and it’s a good time to look at the city as a project of mark and form making in the land, of surgical incisions (the Griffin land axis) that leave no doubt about our occupation. I wrote about it last May (Occupied territory of another sort), recounting New Years Eve there in 2007.
So going back again, here’s a picture I took at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, on 2 Jan of this year. Dead quiet – I don’t know where the inhabitants were, and a jumbled mess that’s still, after 37 years, an embarrassment to the Federal Government, amongst others. (Behind is old Parliament House, where we had a “civilised” afternoon coffee and cake.)
Then wandering around, with the nearby rose garden ablaze with red roses, I was struck again by the incongruity of the elements of the scene. Here are the roses (with Tent Embassy behind).
There’s some mix here that effects me in way I haven’t yet quite nailed -
Walter and Marion Griffin from the US planning the model city, the blooming roses, the First Australians who doggedly camp on the Griffins’ axis, old Parliament House blazing away in the sun, and a dream or collective memory I get about a figure poised on this or some parallel axis, a figure that knows of both land and water axes, one I wanted to depict in the linocut to the left (figure on a land/ water axis).
I spoke about him at the time I originally posted him as:
a figure in touch with some kinds of ceremonial or “knowledge-based” markings in the land and/or water.
He’s wandering around again, and he saw the meteors that passed overhead and fell, fell on the land, fell on the sea…
Ron Dowd
figure on a land/water axis
linocut, collage 2008, 30cm x 5cm
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Here’s a new album of local views, mainly Darlinghurst (the next suburb over from here): Words & Numbers Jan 2009.
I’ve been inspired recently by Paul Butzi at Musings on Photography to go out on foot, regularly, attempting to really consider and reconsider my local environment, to attempt to photograph and revision it – and here in this album are some results of my latest attempt. The idea of “local” is appealing – nowhere to go but just where I get to on foot.
A new Nikon D700 is going to help with this – great low light capability, and suddenly I can use those old AI (non-autofocus) lenses again.
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Driving back through Canberra yesterday on our South East NSW break, we stopped at the National Gallery of Australia. Here in the Marsh Pond (part of the sculpture garden) is a powerful work by Dadang Christanto, an Indonesian artist based in Darwin. The work looked impressive in the hard Canberra summer light.
Dadang Christanto
Heads from the North, 2004
installation, 66 bronze heads
Seeing this work reminded me of another moving installation of his I saw in 2005 – They give evidence, at the Art Gallery of NSW. Here’s a press release from that AGNSW exhibition.
Dadang makes work against a backdrop of 1960s army-sponsored terror and murder in Indonesia, during which his father was killed. There’s memory of personal and collective trauma driving this; it makes for real and uncompromising work. It feels a little odd that the work is sited right next to the outdoor restaurant, where you can fully indulge in the gallery’s fine offerings of bodily sustenance while looking down at those disembodied heads…
But that I’m thinking about the work’s placement is an indicator to me of its effectiveness – I’m involved, not just as spectator, but I’m wondering about my own complacency, sipping my coffee in the face of daily brutality and injustice.
But also not diminished by this, I feel the creative energy of this artist has the alchemical about it – a man creating an “opus” as counterbalance and positive capital against its opposite, the life denying, the repressive. This helps all of us in our own creative ventures.
Here’s an image of the artist installing the work in 2004 (from his Sherman Galleries artist page).
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by Ron Dowd on December 22, 2008
in Photo
Beverly Kaye left me a lovely comment on my post Home – recent carving and as I strolled out from home yesterday for a coffee I thought of the way she’d put it, about the nature of a home:
Home as castle, home as refuge, home as impenetrable fortress, home as sheer beauty.
I’m lucky enough to live in Paddington, one of the few Sydney suburbs that’s largely retained its history, and here (partly due to gentrification and a huge rise in real estate prices) some original wooden cottages remain. Some of these were built for workers on the nearby Victoria Barracks, which was completed in the mid 1800s. Though I’m not sure whether this particular cottage was built as part of this effort, it’s a lovely example of the style.
I like walking past these houses, feeling the unique sense of home each one exudes, the pride with which they face the street, and by extension (my fantasy of) the sense of grounded retreat from which their inhabitants go out to meet the public realm.
And although I live not in one of these lovely cottages but in a small 1920s unit (apartment), home is still that for me, a place for me graced with east and north light (the ideal aspect in Sydney), sitting at its top floor corner, catching the breezes, from which I venture, renewed to take my various places in the world.
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