Chronology of practice

Introduction

In 2002, during my honours year, I strapped 2 metre long poles to my feet. I held poles that hung from the ceiling in my hands. I attached microphones to permanent markers, and the markers to the poles. I tried to write four letters simultaneously.

The poles attached to my feet shifted in a ball and socket joint and slid backwards and forwards on a small piece of track. A clunky mechanical solution to the problem of applying the pressure required to make marks with my legs and feet.

This was my first drawing machine. It was the first time I had to solve physical problems related to the mechanics of mark making. In 2023, over two decades later, I am still working with sound, I am still solving problems that I create for myself around the mechanics of the mark.

It is this consistency that has allowed me to expand the materials, processes, and techniques that I work with. I am drawn to working across all sorts of different media. I still grapple with the problem of having too many projects on the go. I feel that I might be overwhelmed by this problem if I don’t maintain a consistent core to my practice.

I also feel a sense of responsibility to the threads that I follow and the bodies of work they have produced. There are a series of thresholds that a body of work crosses as it grows towards a time when it speaks back to you consistently, with a tangible sense of autonomy. When this happens bodies of work become entities that guide me as much as I guide them. Together we traverse, and become, the terrain.

The works on this page are like trees, both landmarks and living entities, themselves a part of larger bodies, connected by air and by root systems interwoven with mycelium.

Underground the unseen works that make up the body. Overground the still hidden paths between landmarks. On this page the bits that you can see and hear. There is always more.

This chronology is not a map. It is a story that I tell, with these bodies of work, about the paths that we have followed, the things that we have made, and how these paths and things become us.

Rewriting (2002-2011)

When I was studying art at UWS I would travel a bit over an hour each way on the train from Wentworth Falls to the Kingswood campus. I would write a fragmentary dream diary on my morning trip to uni and doing some automatic writing on the way home.

Space Between (2002)

When I started this practice I encountered some of what Andre Breton talks about in his discussion of automatic writing. Phrases that felt as strange to me, the writer, as they might be to anyone else who read those words. However, the more I practiced the more this form of writing came fully under the control of my conscious mind. The Rewriting series of works, that started at the end of my second year at uni (1999), were my response to this experience. I wanted to find ways of getting back to the initial strangeness that I found in automatic writing.

The Chopstick Technique (2002-2011)

I was also interested in imbuing the works that I was making with the energy that comes from focus and concentration. I reasoned that by making the task of writing more difficult I would have to concentrate more on making the shapes of the letters. This approach would also bring to the fore the embodied experience of writing.

After we learn to write as children we don’t have to think consciously about how we make the shapes of the letters. Writing with the different techniques and interfaces that you see here took me back to that consciousness of how the letters are formed.

Pulling Strings (2004-2006)

Freestyling gave me a contemporary reference point for thinking about automatism. I saw the documentary Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme in 2001, (a year after its release). This doco features the rapper Supernatural. I was struck by his incredible ability to improvise and his insights into the discipline and practice.

I still think about freestyling and other forms of musical improvisation and how they relate to visual art practice. There is a tension in practicing the ability to improvise. Practice is habit forming. When we practice we use repetition to create procedural memory (or muscle memory, not a scientific term but one that I like).

No Strings (2007)

Improvisation requires us to go beyond repetition. If we repeat the same phase too often we are no longer improvising. The Rewriting series addresses this tension by creating new ways of interfacing with mark making and inscription. By creating an unfamiliar mark making situation I am forced to improvise as part of the process of figuring out how to work with a new set of physical constraints.

This isn’t the kind of virtuosic improvisation that we find in music but it does address similar questions around practices that are aimed at changing habitual ways of working.