#Repost @rossannels with @use.repost
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I naively hoped this project would tell a rich and generous story, of deep time, of ancient culture, of continuing care of country, of the terrible consequences of colonisation, and of the continuity and generosity of both culture and of the biotic and human communities that surround these extraordinary beings. I have been hurt and disappointed by both the process and outcomes of the project, and I know that many other people have similarly been hurt and disappointed.
Discussions around representing Bunya in the new gallery of the Museum began with George Main and Jilda Andrews from the NMA myself and my then partner in 2017, and by early 2018 Bianca Beetson, Leah Barclay and myself were invited by the NMA to work on a “collaboration that delivers a large, artful installation capturing the form, aesthetic, spirit and meanings of the tree…”
In 2019 I met with members of New York based Local Projects who were engaged by the museum to design the new galleries, and began discussions with the museum about the possibility of casting bunya trees. Late 2019 I was approached by the Katalyst Group to construct trees for the new gallery. With the wisdom of hindsight, I very foolishly signed a contract that was very inadequate for the scale, complexity, and longevity of the project, and was shocked by the lack of artistic autonomy and respect for skills and experience and absence of cultural sensitivity that was inherent in the process that followed. There was a very very lengthy and painful process of design, debate, redesign, engineering and documentation to finally reach sign-off on construction drawings in February 2021. This process involved negotiating with members of the NMA team, Local Projects, Katalyst Group and Built (construction group). Throughout this process I felt that I (and Leah and Bianca) were treated as a general fabricator, rather than as artist and designer, and I felt we struggled to include and maintain any cultural content in the work. A direct arts contract with the NMA would have been much more appropriate..... Continues in comments on @rossannels page #lomandraplacestudios
Never what I expect #firestories #abyssing
Abyssing acts. #firestories #campfirestories #edges #seakingwiththedges
Abyssing #firestories #abyss whoops blurry. Poor eyes.
Gentle with the edges
Came across this long exposure shot of a far off beach fire gathering at night during lockdowns. Strange times. #firestories #longexposure #slowexposure
Making
If I think about it.
The places between us. Or we’re all in the plantation. (Detail, wip) The indentations we carry in our bodies, our lived experiences. The growth and environmental marks in hoop ply. The aliveness of bacterial/fermented plant inks. All reflected back to us. Sanded and drawn back in to. Drawing with machines, with fingers, with arms and body pressings, then weathering it all. The temperature, the rain, the shadows, what was said, the marks we make, post-more-than-humaning-whatever-we-are. Experiments. ⚡️
Image ID: Plant and bacterial inks stained into hoop ply sanded back, and drawn into with bilateral sensorimotor drawing.
#sensorimotordrawing #bilateraldrawing #graphite #plantinks #bioinks #drawing #hoopply #themarkswecarry Still got to wax it. #Experiments
Palms and palms making ways. After the floods, Booloumba Creek. Kabi Kabi Country. #palms #infraredforest #ir
Fire stories in forest. Head torches and campfire smoke. Getting so pro at it 🙃💖 #firestories #campfirestories #campfire #smokestories
Sleeps with fishes, bendy bendy, creek side post flood, scrub blood wood tunnels. Kabi Kabi Country, Little Yabba Creek #scrubbloodwood #floodbanks #floodlandscape #baloghiainophylla
Love song 🎵 🎶❤️🔥 #greatbarredfrog #firestories #lovesong
Fire stories. Misty lit smoke in flooded burnt Country. I thought I could hold something tenderly in this climate/corporate catastrophe. But had to let go of that good willing whatever... as if I wasn’t living in the human disaster machine. Not separate from plantation razed, flood tangled, fire stripped ground. Rest here human, remember who you are, we’re all going down together, we’ll collapse into each other. ❤️🔥 #entropy #wereallgoingdowntogether #firestories #collapsingtogether #ecologicaltransition #illstoptheworldandmeltwithyou #fire #flood #symbiocene #campfirestories
#bilateral #sensorimotordrawing on #hoop #plywood just before I soaked it in #plantinks and then I’ll sand it back and see what happens. Adventures. ⚡️
Pics from this winter/dry season, as the rain begins again 🌧 Kabi Kabi, Jinibara, Wakka Wakka and Yugembah Country.
Mountain becoming a river #overlays #time #photographicmontage #drawing #bilateraldrawing #sensorimotordrawing #environmentaltransition
Our mutual affect. Stains left from foraged fermented plant inks and sensorimotor drawing, sanded back on hoop ply with white beech off cuts (off cuts from Ross’s students @ #lomandraplacestudios)
Thinking about #renewables, #leftovers, #recyclables, #machines and those soldier trees standing to attention in best practice #plantations, and the #communities they cultivate and that fall with their harvesting.. Magnificent entities harbouring so much life, often just chipped and turned into loo paper, def worth a moment’s pause. How we love, who we love. 💚🌲
#whitebeech #hoopyply #harbour #plantinks #whowelovehowwelove #sensorimotordrawing #assembledge #art #affect #drawing #machined
Bodies of weather, meetings of affect, short range and long range weather patterns. (Meetings with the plantation, about the plantation, in the plantation) #bodiesofweather #weatherpatterns #weathered #treepatterns #dendrochronology #bodiesofcapitalism #bodiesofcolonisation #paleoclimatology #sensorimotordrawing #bilateraldrawing #plantationism #weathertime
Image: bilateral sensorimotor graphite drawing, the affect between bodies of capitalist human and plantation hoop pine ply.
Roots glow #infrared
Forms spilling into each other #sensorimotordrawing #bilateraldrawing #shapeshifting #shiftingform #intersections #edges #emergence
Gently gently #sensorimotordrawing #bilateraldrawing #drawing #hoopply #affect #bodies
More endangered low lying subtropical #infrared #infraredforest #infraredlandscape #infraredsubtropcial
I usually see a disorientating blue glow (visible spectrum)- The face of the waterfall and base of the mountain.
Today in infrared I saw the mountain weep. A bloodied face crying between trees. I couldn’t help but bow and coo as I walked towards it, I felt hallowed and awed. A different face again. The ancient rock’s tears becoming what it is said to have loved and fought for- Maroochy.
We tear/tear, spilling parts of our bodies into the world, and hybridise just that little more. This meeting places of two, water and stone, penetrating each other.
One birth of their union is a ladder for juvenile glass eels to climb to more remote water pools on the mountain, where they will then most likely transition to become females. But there are so many hybridities on this edge, a wall of changing shapes/light/matter meanings.
The male eels most likely stay in estuaries and brackish water downstream of here. We are just past the salt line of the river, so more likely to harbour females, who grow enormous before they go back to the coral sea to spawn and most likely die.
One water body in my yard has ‘nessie’ sized eels which seem to wait generations for floods to take them down the gushing face of the mountain.
There are many stories of Ninderry and Maroochy and the surrounding mountains and geology. There’s one that’s been popularised, but there are many, many with different players and different perspectives depending where you are telling the story from.
I often think of the different stories, how one word could mean so many important layered things, the geology, the science, the witness of this place over thousands and thousands of years.
Every mountain, creek, hill, valley, rock, reed and root is so much more nuanced than those European hands could write or ears would/could/chose to hear or comprehend at the time.
Each day I meet some other part of this place.
Image 1. Infrared Ninderry waterfall base.
Image 2. Visible spectrum Ninderry base blue.
Image 3. Long-finned eel in the dam. (Nessie)
#mountains #eels #waterfall #infrared #visiblespectrum #crying #stories #geology #time #hybridity #spills #subtropicalrainforest
Shadows
Leftovers, experimenting, layers, ways, the depth of here #kitchentableart #remnants #ways #silkoffcuts #graphite #layers
Home made mending. Tears in the fabric of things, of ways, in our sensory understanding. Piecing myself together. Tears/tears
#totallyjusttraumatherapyartreally #bilateraldrawing #homemade #gapfiller #mend #ways #drawing #sensorimotordrawing #infraredphotography #quilting #waysofseeing #waysoffeeling #thetears #sensorymap #forthetimes
Ways, way way, oh-o wayyyyyy topology of feels #sensorimotordrawing #bilateraldrawing #infrared #ways #receptors
Oh oh. Infrared new obsession. Sorry. But the flow of light and the depth of colour held by some things and not others is still so peculiar to me. I need to understand more. Kid in a candy shop at the moment. Lucky to have these beautiful places just of the road side. Jinibara Country Kiamba in infrared. These are on a lumix #gx7 converted to #590nm. #infrared #infraredphotography #infraredforest #infraredsubtropical #infraredlandscape
Newbie. Infrared. Got a lot to learn. Jinibara Country. #infrared #infraredlandscape
Beam me up, beam me down.. Yugembah Country
The tumble of things, what we send to the future. A weave of knitted ecosystems and bilateral sensorimotor drawing (a complex rorschach?)A day not far from bed. Life laid down in a collision of patterns leaving a stratigraphic augury. I try to follow but it’s really confusing… as you can see… #strata #augur #sensorimotordrawing #landscapepatterns #affect #rorschach #collision #convergence #bilateraldrawing #patterns #symbiotic #psychotopology #homeostasis #whatwesendtothefuture
This is me in my pjs in my lounge this morn. I don’t generally selfie. It’s not my forte, I have a hang up about photos of myself. But it’s my 49th today and I’d like to not give so much of 💩 about that. So this is me. Hi 👋 Def might delete later. Ha.
I’ve had so much ill health for so long now, and I have struggled to get used to the slippery slide, it makes me extra cranky coz I was really good at pushing through obstacles until I couldn’t anymore. So this selfie is to thank this physical form for pulling me through quite a few impossibilities, and to be grateful for what it is now, despite my grumpy headstrong determination that means I still want to be able to do everything that I can’t 🙄 But I do learn to adapt and do new things within the scope of what this wild and scarred form has given me.
A bit blurry from a wet lens, but I do love the cool temperate subtropical forest of the qld/nsw border. The twists and density of everything holding each other in the wind. The feel of a forest with older trees. And the moss, lichens, and epiphytes covering everything. Having something so tangled on an edge like that feels like it knits everything together. 🪨🌬🍃Yugembah Country #cooltemperatesubtropical #springbrook #epiphytes #lichen #moss #cooltemperaterainforest #subtropical
Flood, fire, weeds. Poor dear Jimna. 💔
This is how I frame my works now due to ongoing storms and floods, little sleep and no morning tea. ⛈ Wild climate literally bashing tree people.
Lovely old people #antarcticbeechtrees at #springbrooknationalpark #yugembahcountry lovely rainy rain 🌧 mostly no reception 💚 little dally with outside world 🤗 ✨
Bilateral sensorimotor drawing. The interwoven relations around us, languages happening within us, alongside us, only shrugged by our consciousness. All the things speaking with us, moving us, in conversation with us. An inter-species language, that we have an obligation to remember, as one part of a larger culture than our own. #sensorimotordrawing #bilateraldrawing #interspecies #interspeciescommunication #theways #patterns #sensoryreceptors #language #whatmovesus #symbiosis #weatherpatterns #symbiocene #greatersensorybeing #systems #drawing
Best kept secret. Mist fire lens flare creeks broken road dropped pins
Rainbow moon in the mist and the rain…. In a post fire and flood zone. Crazy world 💖🌈🌚
I’m making drawings for blankets for a sensory body of work for sometime in the future @elevator_ari These multi species calendars, overlap times, and environmental interactions. Mistletoe and me and all our relations caught in the lines of our growth. Quilted stories. A reminder of perspectives, entanglements, and possibilities. One part of it anyway. I hope this fits and helps to keep you warm. #australiannativemistletoe #sensorimotordrawing #calendar #entanglement #possibilities #macrophotography #macro #woodgrain #quilt #blanket #interlocking #tie #bind #weave #patterns #fossilrecord
Rough, but until my machine stops crashing coz I’m blending timelines and messing with the future🔮Here’s a crude calendar of seismic somasenses and wood grain records of entanglement between species and space, both of us marking time and gathering information about our surroundings. A liminal multi species tapestry of affect, a collective history. I need to remember the options. 🪵🪨⏳🎗☝️
#sensorimotordrawing #somasense #seismic #mistletoe #australiannativemistletoe #drawing #haustoria #woodgrain #patternsofplace #bilateraldrawing #mutualism #entanglement #variancesoftime
ID: sensorimotor bilateral drawing layered over macro photo of carved Australian native mistletoe
A large tailed nightjar. #largetailednightjar The movement looks like cymatics, but it’s moonlight on the Maroochy River, as the tide turns, October 2020. South East Queensland, Australia. Kabi Kabi Country. #birdsofaustralia #maroochyriver #moonlightonwater #fullmoon #birdsounds #duskchorus #yandinacreekwetlands
The waterfall
Family tree. I think of the ways I am with this place, myself as a layered quilt, the strata I can’t dig too deeply into or it will fall apart. Newbies. I’m more like bones and leaves and dirt piled up precariously. But still, I am more here than anywhere else, and as helixes turn in my blood, I fold myself into this place now. All the previous bodies of harm and heartache are laid down beneath my feet. And I learn to love myself, loving you, and forgive, as the harm is the ground that holds me. Mending and still only just tacked together🪡📌 Pieces of silk printed with commodified bodies and bilateral drawings, coloured with domestic dyes and leaves to an opacity. Sticks of silky oak, and sheoak chattered with machines. All our natures mixed without hierarchy. Backyard tree stump and mistletoe haustoria remnants polished and woven with python bones and twine. These pieces of here, of us, tended to with devotion, will also become ground, that I hope will hold you too.
#silkyoak #sheoak #silk #printedtextile #domesticdeity #chatterworked #chatterwork #python #bones #mistletoe #haustoria #green #holding #mending #piecesofme #photomontage #newground #ancestry #theground #newbies #strata #layersofhere #sensorimotordrawing #quilt #bilateraldrawing
ID: layers of different coloured and sized green silk are pieced together. The fabric is printed but you cannot really see the imagery because the colour drowns it out. It is held by a silkyoak carved stick and tacks, it is rectangular as a whole and there are small pieces of carved wood, mistletoe, red gum, sheoak and snake bones threaded together with twine, adoring it.
Learning how you want to be loved, piecing myself together #layers #mending #learning #piecingtogether
After the rain and destruction the forest creeks run clear again. Stony creek, Jinibara Country, little outing, magical place. ✨💚
Mind map #sensorimotordrawing
The times…🕸 life evolves to fit the world in which it finds itself. Thomas Halliday, Otherlands
Thinks. 🪨🦖🕸 rocks/plant/eggs, bilateral marks, mistletoe, movement/time #sensorimotordrawing
My body straddles a time when women could and couldn’t speak out about abuse.
My body is still an anomaly.
My body has been able to break intergenerational violence because it was born in a window where there were small opportunities that had never been before.
I still see bodies that can’t speak out, and I still struggle to speak what hasn’t been said for generations.
To see a ‘first world’ country shut a door that allowed bodies born into intergenerational violence have some access to a different path is devastating.
These decisions affect all humanity, and for our bodies to deal with traumas our culture creates, we need options.
To deny a body autonomy is to send violence into the future.
ID: close up of regenerated bushland.
#roevswade #autonomy #intergenerationalviolence #intergenerationaltrauma