Seabirds

            fish

                        oil rigs

            diving bells

                                    fishing fleets

                                                            whales

                                                oceans

                                                            continents

                                                disappear between the teeth of my shredder.

Wrack and Salvage provokes questions in the face of the climate crisis. What do we value? What do we stand to lose? What will we see destroyed? What are we willing to sacrifice? What are we prepared to save?

This sculptural installation resembles the flying forms of flood debris. There are fifty – one for each year of my life. They are made from books and other documents that were in my possession when I started making this work, during the ACT’s second COVID shutdown in 2021. A non-renewable resource of sorts.

For more about Wrack and Salvage please visit the Wrack and Salvage project page.

“A dilettante, a dabbler. Inch deep, mile wide, flittering from distraction to distraction. When it is all tangents and no centre, when everything seems disparate and disconnected, how do you recognise the patterns? Put the bits together and make something of substance?

‘Dilettante’ is derived from the Latin ‘to take delight’. In this residency, I wanted to apply and reflect on tactics which have proved fruitful in my practice so far, without limiting it artificially in my attempt to control it. As someone who is quickly attracted to and distracted by the next interesting thing that crosses my path, or my mind, I have often struggled with feeling overwhelmed by creative practice. Now, instead of fencing myself in with a predetermined theme or subject, I wanted to start with a working process, and observe what happens when I allow my interest, curiosity and delight to lead me, unfettered.

To provide focus, instead of a fence I used a touchstone. This was a chapter of Jane Hirschfield’s ‘Ten Windows’, a book that (poetically) explores how poetics work. 'Poetry and the constellations of surprise' explores the many subtle or striking ways that surprise can operate to open up awareness, capture attention, shift emotional states or perspective, conjure insight. I worked through that chapter, revisiting its ideas across the three weeks of the residency.

My raw material was a collection of writings made over the past year or two, and a number of video sequences that were created at the tail end of another project. These were all available to play with, to shake together in new combinations, to bend, cut up and recombine….

…At the end of the three weeks, I have an early iteration of a work I am calling 'Matter of Life'. It traverses different ways we fit into the world, how science has shifted our understanding of where we fit, the awe and wonder it can generate, our fragility and impermanence. A lot of the raw material pre-dates the summer fire season and the pandemic, but unsurprisingly the work is suffused with a heightened sense of life and death. I am excited about developing this work to its next stage.”

You can read my reflective essay on this residency in full on ANCA’s blog.