Catalogue essay
Track
by Nandi Chinner
"It is okay to be confused. It is okay to be small. It is okay not to know what to do. Really, the only thing that is not okay is turning away." 1.
It’s early morning and I’m out walking. The story of the night, of who has been here before me, is inscribed in the red sand; the soft curve of the snake, the slash of the wallaby’s tail, and the imprint of its toes laid delicately either side. Plus a myriad of additional tiny footprints, of beings unknown to me, weaving and swirling through the sand. And then there are the other humans; the complex circles, dots and lines of shoe soles, zig zagging tyre tracks and canine paw prints. All these inscriptions are layered over the top of each other, intersecting and criss-crossing in a multifarious map of activity.
This bamboozling enigma of tracks seems to point to my own complicated position as a settler writer and artist living and working in a colonised country. I must be cognizant of the phenomenology of perspective. There is no point in bracketing off what is unpleasant as an attempt to reach something new, something worth saying: I must not look away. Turning away merely sets me on a path of reproduction and repetition. Acting (making art) is ethical and entrusts the artist to work something new, to unsettle worn-out narratives, and keep spaces open. I am placing my feet on the path of thousands of generations Aboriginal peoples’ histories, languages and culture. As a descendant of the invading peoples, I feel the more I ‘learn’ within the Western paradigm about the place now known as ‘Australia,’ the less I know.
This space of unknowing is a space that is familiar to the artist. Whenever we set out to make something, we have intention, an idea, which evolves as we go along. We do our research, gather knowledge and information, but the artwork that arises from these imports is often unknown to us until it is made.
As settler artists working in Aboriginal country, the question of our responsibility in addressing our history and art practice in this framework could be likened to what poet and curator John Mateer calls the Ontological Predicament of being in Australia.2 This predicament, as I see it, relates to finding a mode of representation that is outside of ideas of ‘belonging’ and its opposite ‘alienation’. In Track, the artists work within a state of connection which develops from continued presence, experience, observation and relational encounter over many years of living, walking and art making in the south of Western Australia.
The artists represented in Track, Annette Davis, Sue Dennis, Yvonne Dorricott, Carol Farmer, Lianne Jay and Margaret Sanders have developed these works by pulling on their boots and encountering the country on foot. The Bibbulmun Track is a long-distance walk trail that traverses through 1000km of Noongar country, from Kalamunda in the Perth Hills to Albany on the Western Australia’s south coast. Through collaborative walking, to which is added their own personal histories of walking the Track, these artists have attempted an unsettling of Linnaean taxonomies and Cartesian knowledge through their own embodied engagement with the flora, fauna and physical terrain of the Track.
The repetition of walking allows for the temporal pulse of unconsciousness and conscious to mingle. Surface, circumstance and subjectivity permeate the walker’s / artist’s body, perception and experience. What emerges is a network of signifiers that can point beyond what is known, and locate both the artist and viewer between perception and consciousness, right at the point before sense drags us down. It is here that art wins – it is here among the fragments that art creates the new.
References:
1. Kingsnorth, R. (2019) Life Versus the Machine, https://orionmagazine.org/article/life-versus-the-machine;
2. Mateer, J. (2012) ‘Nativism and the Interlocutor.’ Cordite Poetry Review. 1 November 2012;
3. Web; Minter, P. (2016) Introduction to “Decolonisation and Geopoethics”, https://plumwoodmountain.com/decolonisation-and-geopoethics/
Dr Nandi Chinna is a writer, researcher and environmental activist based in Perth, and living in Fitzroy Crossing at the time of writing this essay. Her latest publication is “The Future Keepers,” (2019) published by Fremantle Press.
Track
by Nandi Chinner
"It is okay to be confused. It is okay to be small. It is okay not to know what to do. Really, the only thing that is not okay is turning away." 1.
It’s early morning and I’m out walking. The story of the night, of who has been here before me, is inscribed in the red sand; the soft curve of the snake, the slash of the wallaby’s tail, and the imprint of its toes laid delicately either side. Plus a myriad of additional tiny footprints, of beings unknown to me, weaving and swirling through the sand. And then there are the other humans; the complex circles, dots and lines of shoe soles, zig zagging tyre tracks and canine paw prints. All these inscriptions are layered over the top of each other, intersecting and criss-crossing in a multifarious map of activity.
This bamboozling enigma of tracks seems to point to my own complicated position as a settler writer and artist living and working in a colonised country. I must be cognizant of the phenomenology of perspective. There is no point in bracketing off what is unpleasant as an attempt to reach something new, something worth saying: I must not look away. Turning away merely sets me on a path of reproduction and repetition. Acting (making art) is ethical and entrusts the artist to work something new, to unsettle worn-out narratives, and keep spaces open. I am placing my feet on the path of thousands of generations Aboriginal peoples’ histories, languages and culture. As a descendant of the invading peoples, I feel the more I ‘learn’ within the Western paradigm about the place now known as ‘Australia,’ the less I know.
This space of unknowing is a space that is familiar to the artist. Whenever we set out to make something, we have intention, an idea, which evolves as we go along. We do our research, gather knowledge and information, but the artwork that arises from these imports is often unknown to us until it is made.
As settler artists working in Aboriginal country, the question of our responsibility in addressing our history and art practice in this framework could be likened to what poet and curator John Mateer calls the Ontological Predicament of being in Australia.2 This predicament, as I see it, relates to finding a mode of representation that is outside of ideas of ‘belonging’ and its opposite ‘alienation’. In Track, the artists work within a state of connection which develops from continued presence, experience, observation and relational encounter over many years of living, walking and art making in the south of Western Australia.
The artists represented in Track, Annette Davis, Sue Dennis, Yvonne Dorricott, Carol Farmer, Lianne Jay and Margaret Sanders have developed these works by pulling on their boots and encountering the country on foot. The Bibbulmun Track is a long-distance walk trail that traverses through 1000km of Noongar country, from Kalamunda in the Perth Hills to Albany on the Western Australia’s south coast. Through collaborative walking, to which is added their own personal histories of walking the Track, these artists have attempted an unsettling of Linnaean taxonomies and Cartesian knowledge through their own embodied engagement with the flora, fauna and physical terrain of the Track.
The repetition of walking allows for the temporal pulse of unconsciousness and conscious to mingle. Surface, circumstance and subjectivity permeate the walker’s / artist’s body, perception and experience. What emerges is a network of signifiers that can point beyond what is known, and locate both the artist and viewer between perception and consciousness, right at the point before sense drags us down. It is here that art wins – it is here among the fragments that art creates the new.
References:
1. Kingsnorth, R. (2019) Life Versus the Machine, https://orionmagazine.org/article/life-versus-the-machine;
2. Mateer, J. (2012) ‘Nativism and the Interlocutor.’ Cordite Poetry Review. 1 November 2012;
3. Web; Minter, P. (2016) Introduction to “Decolonisation and Geopoethics”, https://plumwoodmountain.com/decolonisation-and-geopoethics/
Dr Nandi Chinna is a writer, researcher and environmental activist based in Perth, and living in Fitzroy Crossing at the time of writing this essay. Her latest publication is “The Future Keepers,” (2019) published by Fremantle Press.