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It has been a long time since we last gathered. A virus intervened last year. But today we came together at Sandy Beach, where Canaipa Island looks out along the gaping passage between the far southern end of north Stradbroke Island (Minjerribah), and the mangrove islands that nestle together around that end - Cobby Cobby, Short, Eden, Crusoe - before meeting the long narrow sands of south Stradbroke Island, Tuleen. This sense of an opening is impossible to ignore. It presides over the gentle ease of the place.
When you walk south of the parks and the beach, the land narrows and, depending on the tide, you find that you are walking down a corridor, with wide mangrove flats collecting tidal waters on one side, and the bay lapping at the edges of the raised pass on the other. To the north of the beach area, the wide green park gives way to a shoreline gathering of mangroves. You find your way into little openings, private alcoves where you can perch and dip your feet into the water with its soft sand and jumbles of wonderful objects - pods, leaves, sticks, a crab claw, an oyster shell. Today we met as the tide was just on the turn. The water swelled healthily, creating rust coloured tidal pools as it came up over grasses, rocks, roots and old tree stumps. By lunch time, it had ebbed away, far away, leaving a rippled beach and armies of soldier crabs.
Those that came today wandered off this way and that, taking a measure of things, before settling in and playing with the land and sea and wind, each in her own way. The materials at hand are both tactile - sand, rock, stick, pod, water - and felt in other ways - tide, wind, distance. Distance: now there's and interesting addition to the elemental world! I wondered about this: How can that sense of distance be a material to work with?
We spoke about the way we accommodate our sensibilities to an apparent formlessness in the natural world, going along with the way things present themselves to us, rather than trying to find form and imply patterns. That was one way of doing things: letting the world be as it is, and meeting it on those terms. It takes some trust, which later rewards with a kind of clarity, a sense of energy and knowing.
We also spoke about the way creative engagement in the natural world yields stories and metaphors, that answer to an inner stirring. And because they have been revealed in the elemental world, one tends to find a reliability in their messages. We spoke about the way drawing is an act of translation, and an extraction of one's own internal life onto the page. You simultaneously translate the world and the self, and the drawing is the meeting place. Colour, for example, need only be true to the senses. A tree may be painted red, because it is not only a tree that appears there, on the page, but a person, experiencing that tree!
We spoke about the balance between one's own will, in the making of something, and the will of the materials, in playful subterfuge with the elements. Tangles happen where one wanted lines, for example. How much should one resist and where should accommodation be given? It is always a negotiation. Weaving into the flexing frame of thin branches, tension in one place slackens the threads in another. You want the tension, but you have to hold back. The senses attune to the subtle tightening and loosening: not too much, not too little. Always a negotiation.
We spoke about process, and how the result of a work may be something reduced to a frail shred. But it is a thing that has undergone the most rigorous attention. Too much, too little, giving and taking, demanding and relenting, form and formlessness, the fragile release of meaning from the gritty and slippery things that populate the narrow shores. All these ways of being in the world! I think that is what we find when we come out with a will to make and discover.
Sue Poggioli
Tricia Dobson
Jennifer Stuerzl
Discussing Jennifer Stuerzl's work that centred around the effects of elemental processes on paper.
Tania Budd
Jen Conde
Jo Ariel and George Ferrell joined us today to gather material for their documentary about artists on South Moreton Bay islands. Here we are with Tania's work.
Sharon Jewell: bringing in the distance
Julie Menzies
Sandy Ward
Clockwise from left front: Tricia Dobson, Sharon Jewell, Jennifer Stuerzl, Sandy Ward, Julie Menzies, Sue Poggioli, Jen Conde, Tania Budd. Photograph taken by Jo Ariel.