Dreamings of  Mystery and Time:

The Australian Swamplands

 & Black Swans

Mothering Black Swan (the Pen) and Cygnet, hidden within Bracken. Fronds	Black Swan and Cygnet No2 hidden within  Bracken Fronds.

Fountain Pen & Archival ink on Watercolour paper

both drawn with Fountain Pen & Archival ink on Water Colour paper, with Chinese watercolours and rice paper collage. 

57 x 75 cm. 2011.

Black Swan  Gliding no 1 & 2  

both drawn with Fountain Pen & Archival ink on Water Colour paper.

57 x 75 cm. 2011.

Swan under showers of Moonlight, flying from the approaching storm
Fountain Pen & Archival  ink  on Water Colour paper, .
57 x 75 cms. 2011.

Swans Swimming under showers of Wattle Blossoms
Fountain Pen & Archival  ink  on Water Colour paper, .
57 x 75 cms. 2011.

Within my artworks, I portray shimmering mysteries of black swans gliding through the deep moonlight of  Australia's threatened  & vanishing wetlands.

They are my pen and Ink drawings that I have laid down upon  handmade watercolour paper using my collections of old and new fountain pens. They were drawn as meditations on the wetlands, over long periods of time using  my  pens, some of them over a hundred years old. Using their varied and wonderful nibs to recreate the beauty of  the Australian wetlands. The many colours of Inks that  form these works, are of archival quality, for these drawings, I use  mainly the long lasting American Noodler's inks and also the  Japanese Sailor's ink.

At the moment, I am concentrating on a series of Black Swan drawings.  For me, the black swan  is long been a symbol of dark  mystery, and silent gliding enchantment. I remember their sad haunting cries from my childhood when I lived next to a large swamp. Now the swamp has long dried to a white sands, but I still remember their dark and elusive forms, gliding across the deep waters, tantalising as the shifting and changing nature of the wetlands themselves.

I re-create once more on Australian hand-made "Blue Lake" paper, using my collection of old and new fountain pens filled with archival-quality Noodler's inks these imaginatively remembered wetlands to come alive once, to give the viewer a glimpse into Australia's deep time, into a magic place where the clash of cultures and contested lands gives way revived ancestral stories and mythopoetic moon-place.

These drawings are my personal memories are revived within deep time to reveal marshes that hide their secrets in mists and giant trees are frozen dancers in the wind. They are re-imaginings, seeking the “sacred spaces” in the bush, in order to renew the waters and life of the old ones who live eternally within the land.

The artist here invites the veiwer on a journey through levels of reality, from the liminal to the subliminal. As it travels it sings the tracks, from the macrocosm of a world empire and its colonial strategies, to the microcosm of a lost East Gippsland environment and its people, to the concealments of a family living on this borderland, to faint ghosts of childhood whispers and fragments of dreams.

This is a journey for all Australians, exploring our shared history through a story of hidden ancestry and censored childhood. But interwoven into this are the greater themes of colonial globalisation, including climate change and cultural evolution

Our history of colonial relations can involve a dialogue between our two cultures, it does not have to be the simple imposition of one culture on another. Transcultural bridges can be built across the deepening chasm of contested history between Indigenous and mainstream cultures.

Within the artworks of “Borderlands”, time becomes an in-between liminal place of mystery and magic the liminal magic depths of lost ancestors and forgotten wetlands. Where time is fluid, and where the past and the future glides along whirlpools of many Secret pools.

This sense of eternal time, where fragments of past reflect the in-betweenness of cultural intermingling, renewing a dreaming that shines and shimmers, restoring forgotten places within our hearts, seeking reconciliation of indigenous and mainstream cultures. Inviting a journey through levels of time and reality, from the liminal to the subliminal.

A journey through the layers of time and history undertaken to places where many of our cultural certainties are questioned

So within these drawings,  I seek to resurrect this increasingly lost landscape of water and fertility intoliminal and subliminal maps to be opened by the postcolonial imagination, revealing pathways leading to silenced memories and hidden stories.