Sun Lines

The show at the Annandale Galleries, Sydney, Australia was my first solo show in Australia and consisted of over eighty works made between 1990-2001. Aspects of my work had previously been compared with certain aboriginal artists and the Annandale one-person show was the first Australian Gallery to make a one person show with an Aboriginal Artist. Working on found wood, focusing sunlight to create burnt, over exposed images of the sun, linked in, in certain minds, with aspects of northern aboriginal belief systems. The sun being seen to be a fundamental source of energy and a spiritual force to be respected and utilised through tribal and ritualistic processes. The work shown was linked not just through process of execution but selected from work I made that focused on questioning where the mental, spiritual dimensions that I attempted to hold within the making process originated from. Aspects of what L. Kahn describes as ‘pre form’. A so-called place within the mind frame, before thinking. I was asked in 2003 (two years later) by Christopher Morton, an Oxford University Researcher, and editor of ‘Dwelling’, a publication devoted to exploring the notion of dwelling in the work of contemporary writers, artists, researchers in a variety of disciplines, to contribute to the publication. This is an attempt by me to describe this place of ‘pre form’. Images of nesting boxes from my garden were used to imaginatively parallel this inner and outer realm of ‘pre thinking’, ‘thinking’ and ‘external action’. Eight works from the exhibition were purchased by the museum of New South Wales and were I believe, in part used as examples to open up debates around a northern European Artistic tradition (Archaic) and Aboriginal Art