On unstable ground : painting navigation through the boulder-fields of kunanyi. A local exploration of wildness and landscape through the lens of lostness and instability

This studio-based research project explores how to paint the experience of navigating the ‘wild’, un-formed (un-paved), marked route through the boulder-fields of kunanyi (Mt Wellington) known as The Lost World Track. kunanyi looks over Hobart’s CBD and its proximity forms a visual landmark and navigational reference, as well as a physical barrier to urban expansion. I contend that how we image and imagine the mountain environment surrounding Hobart is critically important. Our representation of kunanyi plays into global debates about the changing definition of ‘wilderness’ and reflects the ambiguities and instabilities inherent in the term ‘landscape’. This project gives these topics a specific and local focus by navigating The Lost World Track, whose steep, jumbled and collapsing boulder-field become a geological motif through which to explore the instabilities inherent in landscape painting and the environment at large. Although kunanyi is a clearly visible landmark of Hobart, this project views, imagines, represents, and interacts with the mountain not as distant vista but through painting a sensory, first-person experience of The Lost World Track. By situating the painter and the viewer in the position of the walker navigating the precipitous Lost World Track, they become hypothetically ‘lost’ and highly engaged in the acts of physical and visual navigation. As a result, the view of landscape becomes a dynamic one, ungrounded and unstable, and where, as Hobartian philosopher Jeff Malpas states, ‘human and non-human intermingle to the extent that these categories lose any absolute character’ (Malpas 2011, p. 16). This project has its genesis in my paid work as a ‘track-worker’ amongst the boulder-fields of kunanyi. This position causes me to be implicit in ‘landscaping’ the mountain environment. It has afforded me a unique first-person perspective of the mountain and its walking tracks as a place of work, recreation, and ecological preserve where humans intersect with the non-human environment. The methodology of this project reflects my experience of working and walking on kunanyi. Texts by Rebecca Solnit and Robert Macfarlane have informed the concept of landscape, while Roslynn Haynes and Malpas’ refutation of the term wilderness reflects a globally changing perspective on wild places, of which I offer kunanyi as a local example. Further readings of Bruce Braun and Owain Jones have suggested studio-based processes that emphasise environmental and perceptual instability, while the theories of Will Hunt, M.R. O’Connor and Laurence Gonzales on navigation have led to a series of studio investigations that engage with the process of lostness. The paintings test the potential of presenting kunanyi in a close-cropped vertical format of tumbling and towering boulders, with spatial and picture plane ambiguities devoid of the main orienting feature of western landscape painting – the horizon line. Various painterly strategies were developed that emphasise environmental and perceptual instabilities through a process of lostness. With debate surrounding development plans and appropriate uses of kunanyi, it matters how we see the mountain represented in images. I propose that rather than representing the mountain as a distant static vista, it should instead be presented as entangled in the lives of Hobart’s residents who frequent the mountain physically and imaginatively. This project presents a series of paintings that explore this physical and imaginative entanglement