Animal Magician's Hut - Puma Search
In 1988 I first heard of an elusive puma that had been sighted throughout the Victorian countryside and reported in the media. Over a period of two years, I made trips to a range of areas where the wild animal was sighted. I used its elusive qualities as a model to draw from. I was fascinated by how its apparent passage through an area changed my perception of that space into a 'wild state'. I was also interested in its effect on people who had sighted it.
It was its absence that intrigued me the most in my own journeys, which were an excuse to meander alone through a loaded environment as a means to search for mystery and to create myth.
Days were spent wandering scrub and bush land, where I was easily able to project significance upon every element I encountered. Because of the puma myth, the place where a fence line was broken down was a place where one open space could leak into another. I equated this with drawing itself—how a vacant space operates in relation to another, what a line might contain, what energy it creates—in the same way that a fence might contain a wild beast or let it through.
One puma sighting involved two witnesses observing the beast retreat to an isolated bush within a paddock. People were gathered to surround the bush as a helicopter hovered overhead. The beast was never found. I imagined someone lifting the last rock at the centre of that last wild place, then dividing the last atomic particle, and continuing to expand into an interior domain.
I imagined that in the act of focusing one’s eyes, convergent lines of sight cross over like crossbones and enter a domain behind the surface of things. This enabled me to perceive the entire fabric of our material world as a facade or partition, behind which alternative states of reality are ever present.
Explore this theme
1. Introduction
2. Depot Boxes
3. Tracks
4. Art Battery
5. Puma Search (You Are Here)