A twisting path guiding my journey, through fallen sticks and rivers of ants, decaying trees exposed and being eaten from the inside out, their crushed leaves and rich warm earth beneath my toes, finding thistles and their tuber’s, tasting of sweet pungent spice.
Maggie swooping and finding lunch in worms, their ancestral central column not unlike ours, the twisting wriggling and engulfing of all things, the continual spiral of life and death meeting to form one.
The interrelatedness of all things, its divine complexly, becoming ever more noticeable the more I fix my attention on its all inspiring wonderment.
Meeting the land once more, I gather the tools and ingredients. Bundling my enigmatic embodied experiences and emotions within fabric, a container of the past and present.
I am interested in how I can locate myself within the living landscape and somehow capture the embodied experience, memory and essence of the places I spend time in through sculptural forms.
Spending time in the bush, walking through the environment quietens my mind and awakens my senses. Sounds of bird calls, smells of Eucalyptus, feeling the rich warm earth beneath my toes with each step, tasting the wild foods I encounter and seeing the reoccurring patterns and forms that make up my surroundings and allow me to immerse in them. I am always amazed by the new discoveries I make each visit, by just sitting, watching and creating with my hands. I collect pieces of the living landscape as a way to engage with and contemplate on the interconnectedness of things.
Each collected piece – maybe a leaf, a branch, a stone, or handful of soil – is an entry point into an infinitely complex web of relationships, a physical manifestation of evolutionary and geological processes, billions of years old. To appreciate this, it takes lengths of time, in a quite place and looking closely to really see these connections. Many hours are spent walking, sitting, bundling, dying, and binding; these gestures become liminal experiences exploring meditative and embodied states expressed through sculptural and textile pieces.