Sound of No Shore: Ghost Hand Writing
This is a large work, measuring 245x288cm. It consists of gouache on 15 sheets of paper. The work is a culmination of many references that were autobiographical in nature.
The image is a view towards the East over my home town of Melbourne and the hills I had moved to from Sydney as an adolescent. The year I arrived in those hills, a gigantic dust storm covered Melbourne, just before the terrible Ash Wednesday bushfires of 1983. Both natural occurrences filled the sky with darkness.
In my later teenage years I moved to bayside suburbs depicted in the same view. It was here that I became filled with a foreboding sadness while observing the movement of the tide and the pollution it brought.
I developed a mythology in which a wave-bringer resides beyond the horizon and transmits a message of her ruin through the tide. At a later date I developed this into a series of very small images, some of which are included here.
In ‘Ghost Hand Writing’ I linked the memory of dark skies coming in waves of warning with the later message I had imagined coming in from the sea.
The central circular form in 'Ghost Hand Writing’ relates to an early childhood experience of rubbing my tired eyes and seeing floating hollow circles behind my eyelids. These concentric circles seemed to recede into space, and my perception was that they were deep eyes looking back, like the open ends of hollow tubes.
This concept relates to other images I had made of ‘Bones of Vision’, with eyes that penetrate matter and see through the skin of the world. These same bones of vision are the pathways that the noble soul takes in Transmigratory Passage of the Death Wish.
It is this vision that I have tried to describe in the centre of ‘Ghost Hand Writing’. It is like the open end of a telegraph wire or nerve-ending, a bone-transmitter through which a dire warning is received. It hangs like a blind eye or frozen midnight sun that sinks over my home in the East and tells of no good thing.
Explore this theme
1. Introduction
2. Uproot
4. Ghost Hand Writing (You Are Here)
