2013

Seamus Heaney was an Arcadian poet––of pastoral scenes and death. His bog is a holy abyssal muck of Ireland––a mineral cleanse. Of course, in Australia we have no no bog or prairie––ours is haunted bushland. An enclosure of wild eucalyptus, coppice, wild grasses, marsupial shit, small predators. Bushland that gives off an aura of self-containment. The earth is hemmed in; a sewn up hessian sack of life. Barest fortunae. Native birdlife festoons in canopies of eucalyptus. Kookaburra’s chortle is folkloric, corella’s shrill persistent, magpie warbles delicately, king-parrot is chatty-natty insistent, rosella’s rhythmic pitch is constant, but raven’s abyssal croak puts over all, the grinding music of a bush organ. The sky is marbled blue with netted feathered clouds that swing low––smoke into tree-heads. This fragile back-country gives off an aura of self-contained. How can my insignificant human frame walking the track match its intricate listening? Nothing resonates here but exeunt truth at point of contact with wild periphery.

Boundary Speak (Diaries 2013-2021) centrally focuses on reportage of my life’s happenings, notes on readings, phantasms or wild forays, riffs off music or footnotes from poems that take me on a strange journey, ruminations and thought fragments. My outsider artwork is focal on my Re-learn your Alphabet for the Twenty-First Century drawings (some of which are collaborations with my children), my robot series, as well as many other drawings undertaken over the period 2013-2021.