It's been a few weeks now since I have returned from my trip to Heard and McDonald Islands. It has taken some time to adjust back to my land lubbing life after 2 months at sea. There were several days of landsickness, paired with a general feeling of disorientation as I tried to get back into my 'normal' schedule and routine.
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| Leaving Fremantle |
Islands are
vantage points, spaces for reflecting back and distancing ourselves. They
possess significant geographical features that determine and influence
experience. Islands are defined by their sea-bound borders, by distance and
isolation. They lie off mainland shores, independently other. To be an
‘islander’, is to be someone who is acutely aware of both belonging and being
separated, of connection and disconnection. It is a fluctuating perception of
one’s place in the world, one that is largely determined by a very specific
type of spatial awareness and physical geography.
Australia is the
world’s island continent, another here or perhaps there, depending upon where
you position yourself and from where you come. Positioning oneself is
difficult, in the fixed sense. Position suggests being motionless, steady and
unmoving. Alternatively, thinking of it as an active process, as something that
you continually do while always being aware of relation, it is more of a
becoming. Rather than being a specific
location, it is a continuum where you are never quite here nor there. Ross
Gibson writes about Australian existence as being provisional, fluid and
changeful.
As
the decades have accrued…the colonial fixity has never fully gelled. For even
though the land itself seems to be the rock-solid basis of Australian
experience, the defining quality here is actually changefulness. There’s a
motility in Australia – something skittish, relational and ever-altering –
which means long-term inhabitants should expect only occasional moments of
poise while remaining always engaged in jostling contingency and fragility.
History teaches that to live well here, you need to be scanning close and far,
catching environmental instructions, ready to respond when each emerging moment
brings a new pulse of threats and chances. This requires a mentality that is
attentive to the environment but not deeply embedded in any one locked and
landed portion of it (Gibson 2013, p.
259).
Gibson makes an
interesting observation regarding the culturally inherited nature of perception
and its relation to identity as being spatially oriented. He writes of the
‘improvisatory, opportunistic and weather-guided’ indigenes (Gibson 2013, p. 259). Theirs is a fluid and responsive connection to country
enacted through daily practice and ritual. Theirs is an existence dependent
upon the ability to dynamically re-articulate one’s movements and practices in
relation to an immediacy of being in country. This is in contrast to the fixity of a rigid colonial
vision of settlement. It was a perception that settlement would be permanent. It
was an assumed certainty of stasis that disregarded the protean nature of the
antipodes, of an island of ever-altering unpredictability and changefulness.
As pointed out
by Gibson, Australian colonial history is not only a story of the desire for stability
but also one of departures and arrivals. It has never truly been embedded in
the land itself. Perhaps it is because of its displaced and mobile history that
stasis and settlement were so longer for. He reminds us that Australia’s
colonial history is also a maritime one, one of shifting horizons of people’s from near and far, from here and
there (Gibson 2012, pp. 231-232). Contemporarily Australia is an island of
migration, of coming to and leaving from. I wonder if it is indeed the sea that
surrounds which defines antipodean existence? The ocean that separates also
connects. The watery void between becomes an active space that surrounds and
necessitates negotiation. To leave (or arrive) one has to pass over and
through. Duration and the journey itself are inherent characteristics of land
girt by sea. Gibson writes further in relation to the work of Australian artist
Simryn Gill,
…to
be Australian might have less to do with being in a place than it has to do
with being in temporal patterns of movement, being in rhythms of gleaming
realization, being in glimpsed insights and occluding befuddlements, in a
continual process of reorientation, action and reaction. Gill helps us sense
how being Australian might actually mean being untethered or placeless. It
might mean being blithely restless within the changefulness that the nation
offers its citizens, which means appreciating how to live in dynamic patterns
of time rather than in native plots of place (Gibson 2013, p.
260).
This project has
offered up a chance to consider the significance of the sea within my own
personal story. What is this placeless place? How can I be located without
being stationary? The sea is also a space that continues to harbour mysteries
and the unknown - a novel idea within a world that is dominated by information,
surveillance and knowing. We frequently steer away from such uncertain courses
towards the safety and comfort of the known. To step into the ambiguous sea of
unknowing is risky and de-stabilising. But perhaps it is where one needs to be
willing to go. It is a necessary step towards making sense of one’s
placelessness. It is an alternative
perception, to think of the fluid notion of uncertainty as a generative state
of being. It is a way to consider its potential to facilitate new connections
with the unfamiliar.
Within this project
the unfamiliar has been a critical driver of curiosity and inquiry. It is
something that has led me on a journey without a pre-empted end point. I have
navigated shifting currents through rising and ebbing tides. The flotsam and
jetsam of artistic endeavour have been my attempt to mark the journey and
situate myself in a fluid world.
It is in this
space between, the watery boundary, between here and there where this project
is situated and with that myself. I am searching for a place that has no
definite location. I have embarked upon an unending search, looking for my next
point of trajectory, traverse and journey. Through the constant attempts to
orientate myself I have sought momentary solitude treading water. Between the
here and there offers a chance to stop momentarily, to breathe and look around.
The unknown presents a place to pause, to be in the moment and critically
mindful of my surroundings. The unknown enables the perpetual search, and with
it an acceptance that contexts, frameworks and knowing are (and should be)
under constant review-edit-rewrite, or in my case, re-draw.
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Over the course of the journey I became most interested in the human element within the encounter. The relationships between scientists, crew, ship and the environment began to feature in my drawings, strange interactions that help to build some kind of understanding of humans and the world they inhabit.
Gibson, R 2013, 'Motility', in Cd Zegher
(ed.), Here art grows on trees: Simryn
Gill, exhibition catalogue edn, Australia Council for the Arts, Gent,
Belgium, pp. 259-267.
