Aboriginal
Couple skimming across the Moonlit Waterways in their Bark Canoes.
Fountain Pen & Archival ink on Water Colour paper.
57 x 75 cms. 2009
These are my Canoe Drawings:
The Australian Indigenous people shaped our land into a fertile fragile beauty. They lived in the wetlands, and feasted from its shimmering abundance.
For many tens of thousands of years, they built their canoes out of bark, and sometimes reeds, in shapes that varied from very long vessels that could accomadate a whole family, to simple one person canoes.
Here the passage of time becomes places of memory and forgetfulness, where the past mingles with the now, to produce shifting cultural identities.
Resurrecting deep places and times of concealment and hidden secrets, where geography lies buried somewhere deep, to discover lost culture and a suppressed collective psyche.
The subject material for these drawings and digital images comprises old photographs, wood engravings and paintings from the 19th and early 20th centuries, old official records, family photographs, my own digital images, and personal memories.