I has taken me awhile to decide what will be the one image I send out for my upcoming exhibition – it was hard because all my images are at my fingertips as i work on a digital platform, unlike if I had to take a photo of works on canvas and so on- then I’d have to decide, get lights , a backdrop etc. And in my learning about this overcrowded visual world we live in whilst trying to be my own marketing engine it has been that one really good image resonates…but then comes the panic of ‘is it the one’? Does it say the most etc… is it too pink black manly girly etc  – So here’s a back story to the image I chose to represent my first solo show,  This Hopeful Shack, an exhibition of 24 large scale drawings about living in a seaside shack.

But first …

[Silence]

FIRST VOICE (very softly)

To begin at the beginning:

(from the opening to Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas)

 I’m an archaeologist, a historian and an artist whose main practice is drawing.  I like drawing and I like all these times to be in one drawing if possible. As Simon and Garfunkel say ‘Time, time, time…see whats become of us’.

East coast Artist Ben Quilty has ‘Irish skinned convict stock on Gundungurra land’ on his insta page. He is specific about who he is and where he is at this time. I like it. I can tell you that this shack that I draw and live in sits on Wadandi country,  in the isolated South West of Western Australia. And that I am a mix of 6th generation convict and migrant Scottish mother. But Before this shack we went to buy a blank piece of coastal land and when we were given the original title paperwork, all flowy cursive and fairly indecipherable except for the iconic Crown stamp, my first thought was ‘this is the piece of paper that stole the land’ and the rest of the following thoughts were complex and fraught. I still have that piece of paper.

Koala teapots, linoleum, sharks and the personal flowed into lines as I drew the first year of living in this new old shack which sits within a small coastal hamlet subsumed by the elements and a wildlife ever present at a door with rusted curls. I read Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas 7 times. The drawings became about the layers of accumulated time and the passing of nature through our lives, about an underlying danger, wildness, sadness, humour and a hope for something to change. 

At the time of drawing the koala teapot- a Japanese product-  the East coast wasn’t on fire but as these catastrophic events unfolded and I finished the drawing another Invasion day had passed along with the tragic destruction of the fires and the words ‘Always was, always will be‘ found themselves scribbled into the blackened serving tray underneath the Sanderson Print- an English Company.  I find the quiet way objects exist in a domestic environment, objects the inhabitants have specifically chosen as an aesthetic reminder of nature, a nature with all the wild missing, very interesting. 

 ‘Always was, always will be‘ They are beautiful poetic powerful simple inescapable words.  Simon Schama writes that our language grows from the distinctive natural world around us but with the passing of time we have simply forgotten or choose to forget how we came to have those words in our mouths. However, we can draw it.