Wanderlust is in its final week, and I'm only now getting the chance to blog about it! Thanks to everyone who came along to the opening and has been since, and to so many for the kind words about the show. It's fantastic to have coordinated an exhibition in which everyone contributed such amazing work (I never doubted that they would) and to see people really enjoy the show as a whole is amazing. I always thought this show would be fun, but it also gave myself and the other artists involved a serious chance to look at walking in the context of our art practices, and an already significant part of many of our art practices. Many of us have a background in painting, and as Raquel Ormella summed it up at The Walks Symposium recently at ANU, walking is a way for artists to engage with the history of landscape painting; to form their own experience of it and engage with it anew.
My own interest in walking sprung from an interest in how people engage with landscapes, so it's no surprise that I became interested in direction. Or more specifically, how people are directed to move through a landscape. To follow a trail, according to Rebecca Solnit in her fantastic book Wanderlust, is to accept someone else's interpretation of the landscape. This idea stuck, and so when I went for a walk at Tidbinbilla in March (the Gibraltar Rocks walk) and saw the signposts, I took photos of them and took them back to the studio. These signposts were reasonably unobtrusive, but also very necessary- at some points, you're wandering grassy hills with no visible trail, so you have to look out for the signs. Looking for the signs, and the signs themselves, had a big impact on how I experienced the landscape. Rarely fully immersed, wandering, and never lost.
The series Sentinels, Tidbinbilla was not what I was planning to make for this exhibition, and that's interestingly also a change in direction. Insert bad pun about following the signposts... But seriously, this year has been all about adjusting to working in a different organisation and role, so instead of wandering and getting lost in my art practice I've been looking for more structure and direction in my works and my art practice in general. This series has led the way to a big project I'm just starting, which is similarly a series of smaller paintings, which tell a story about how I engage with another landscape. Mountains and the sublime continue to play a part, and now so does the digital realm. I look forward to sharing more on that soon.
Wanderlust exhibition closes this Sunday at M16 Artspace, 21 Blaxland St Griffith, 12pm-5pm.
Sentinels, Tidbinbilla (1-4; there are 10 in total) 2014, oil on board