Natural Sculptures

A current project is new series called Natural Sculpture bring attentions to the human need for form and how form reveals past human activity, relict everywhere in Australia (hence the recent arguments about wilderness as elitist and wrong - or necessary and vital, as last year over 50% of the world’s population became urbanised). Of course we need the notion of wilderness and wild places and need to realise we are part of nature and that beautiful flowers grow in cracks in the pavement - it's not either - or.

William Carlos Williams noticed the ordinary. His unique prosody gives a common plant and insect their due:

‘A concrete disposal tank at

one end, small wooden

pit-covers scattered about – above

sewer intakes, most probably –

Down the centre’s a service path

graced on one side by

a dandelion in bloom – and a white

butterfly – . . . ’

‘A Bastard Peace’

Much of this project is in the forest - I cannot bring it to a studio or gallery (for a start it is a Nature Reserve) - so I have to document through photographs - just as Andy Goldsworthy does his ephemeral works. So the photographs are documentation, simply "pieces of paper" (Thomas Ruff) which brings in a raft of issues. As standing in for something but not representing somtehing - as in a portrait - can they evade Roland Barthes insiatnce that photography is about loss (see his discussion of punctum & studium in Camera Lucida).

"A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask." Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977). For an alternative view, see Joel Snyder, "Picturing Vision," Critical Inquiry 6, Spring 1980, p499-526.

These images taken over the last two days, document various degrees of Natural Sculpture.

Friday Jan 20th 2011, North Beach, Valla

Sat 21st Valla