Walking the Murray- in the footsteps of William Blandowski
Beaver Galleries, Deakin
During the winter of 2021, I undertook an artist's residency at The Art Vault in Mildura on the Murray River. The paintings in this exhibition are an outcome of the many hours I spent exploring the river's banks and other local wetlands by foot, experiencing the surrounds in fog, sunshine and storm. I was intrigued by the abundant birdlife and the sudden transition of vegetation from low desert mallee to verdant tangled strips of black box eucalyptus and river red gums that hugged the river. I saw many traces of long indigenous habitation such as shell middens, scar and boundary trees. These traces were intermingled with those left by later white settlers in the form of memorials, tanks, European trees and weeds.
The way that walking directed my experience of the Murray is mirrored in my paintings. The main subjects of the paintings are those facets of the natural environment especially noteworthy to me- local birds, animals, distinctive plants and historical markers. If encountered when walking, I would stop and look long and hard, carefully observing, trying to understand. I reflect this activity by representing such subjects naturalistically. My experience of the location was also sensory and imaginative so these subjects are placed in partly imagined landscapes where scale, space and colour have been altered. These locations are compilations from different sources including drawings I made, photographs I took, internet sources, patterning and Blandowski’s historical archive. The melange of references and visual styles in the works is akin to my complex experience of 'place'.
