echo landscape memory 2010

Stockyard Gallery, Foster.

Landscapes exist in front of our eyes and in memory. And in rich and subtle ways landscapes carry their own memory too.

These pictures are about the mind’s processing of landscape rather than the way the eye first records it. They represent space like it occurs in dreams without concrete boundaries, like at the edges of our peripheral vision.

Three levels of landscape memory I’m exploring are footprints and activities now invisible, geological time and evolutionary memory, and imprints on my own memory.

Unlike a snapshot, I try to represent multiple viewpoints in compositions that represent the experience of being in country. Like standing on top of a hill and drawing everything you can see in every direction, not a panorama but as if it were the whole planet you could see at once.

Colour feels like a sort of well being therapy, and I don’t mind turning up the volume.