Sound of No Shore - Uproot
These works explore the extraction of thought from material as a type of physics of my own invention. I was interested in the depiction of an imaginary space in which thought-forms develop of their own accord, expanding into dimensions far removed from their origins. I likened this to a dream in which one dreams a continuous series of dreams, each one giving rise to the next.
All of the titled works in this section are large works, measuring around 250x150cm.
From Frozen Grounds, Burn Path, Initiating the Senses into the Holy Eye
Although these images resemble objects in space, they were also intended to be read as flat diagrams, or maps of the path of a thought as it grows through realms of the imagination. These forms were like antennae, seeded in the dry matter of the head, extending into other worlds.
It was imagined that as a thought leaves the internal hemisphere of the head, it might travel through a variety of atmospheres, each of which has its own level of resistance to the fluid transmission of the thought. Eventually, the outward expression of the thought blooms, is immersed in feedback or emits imaginary growth. This echoes the organic extensions of plant-forms as they appear on earth.
In Pod, the emission at the final stage of the journey is a dreamt image of two ‘ghost cliffs’, which are the sentinel forms of the interior of each side of the skull—the view one might see by looking out from inside the head to a space beyond.
These cliffs also relate to my earliest memories of North and South Head in Sydney Harbour, a gateway to the open sea opposite the area where I grew up.
Reference was made to these ghost cliffs in earlier photographic works, in which I had translated the topography of the surface of my head into sculpted ‘landforms' cast in bony plaster.
The image of these cliffs loomed large in my consciousness at the time of making and was referred to repeatedly in other works.
Spectre of a Rose
This work depicts the two immense forms of ghost cliffs submerged under layers of information at the top of the image. The interior landscape of the head is printed in woodcut below, so that combined with the cliff forms, it has the function of an open tomb.
The rose referred to in the title is in fact the path of travel taken by some outgoing thought, like the burn path of an astronaut or the map of a shaman. It extends upward like a perilous antenna, snapped off at the stalk by the hand that drew it. (My hand!)
The open form of the head at the base of this image was to reappear in later works, most prominently in Fertile Ground and Offering.
Song of the Iron Hunter
The scene is subterranean; it depicts a type of divination or mining of a barren state. I had written in my notebooks of ‘the iron in the soul’ as the dead core substance of matter, a state of being beyond all hope. This picture shows hopeless hands striving to extract some vestige of spirit from the wastelands of the head. Primitive ‘ghost traps’ have been manufactured to filter nutrients.
In this barren place, I imagined that deeply submerged psychopathic energies were the only active life forces left to take root and feverishly make sense of madness. This could be necessary activity to attract the return of the noble soul, alluded to in Transmigratory Passage of the Death Wish.
Explore this theme
1. Introduction
2. Uproot (You Are Here)