Internal Archives
Long before I packed my bags for Tasmania, I held a steadily growing collections of stories, imagined geographies and dreamscapes relating to the land. An image in a brochure might expand into a vast mountain range, or the talk of cold weather would bring expectations of blizzards and frozen lakes. Upon arriving these preconceived places, while inaccurate, didn’t disappear. Instead, they acted as a lens through which I viewed the land, looking for commonalities between the psychological landscape that I had created, and the physical one before me. Internal Archives is a series of works which documents this play between the physical land and personalised versions of place.
The series spans lithography, mezzotint, ink and charcoal drawing, bound together by a selective colour pallet. The combination of these mediums resembles the collage-like process that the mind performs to consolidate clear details and warped recollections of place. Some works speak to the presence of the physical environment using sharp realism and the imagery of lace-like sea foam, islands of lichen and crystalised flowstone from places I have visited. The Tasmanian environment is directly brought into the series through the fragments of weathered of paper, submerged for days beneath the oyster shells and river rocks of the Derwent. Other pieces display the non-referential landscapes resulting from spontaneous flows of ink, and imagined island charts which hover over paper grounds.
Viewed individually, each work is only a fragment. Combined, they form the storyboard of a landscape, any piece of which could be rearranged to create a new narrative of place.
By utilising my own internal archives of place, I seek to reveal the personalised lenses that we bring to our interactions with the land. In doing so I hope to also validate the unreliable images that result from trying to expressing our subjective perceptions of the world that we share.