Dark Emu, Black Swan Theory
2019
Mixed media paint, oil and metallic tint and resin on plywood
90x60cm
Private Collection
Tasting Notes;
“Biame, the creator Spirit Emu, left the earth after its creation to reside as a dark shape in the Milky Way. The emu is inextricably linked with the wide grasslands of Australia, the landscape managed by Aboriginals. The fate of the emu, people and grain are locked in step because, for Aboriginal people, the economy and the spirit are inseparable. Europeans stare at the stars but Aboriginal people also see the spaces between where the Spirit Emu resides.” Dark Emu Bruce Pascoe
A Black Swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was.
I have been inspired by works ‘Dark Emu’ as well as Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s ‘Black Swan Theory’.
This painting was exhibited in the 2019 Mosman Art Prize
Not a candle to Peter
2019
Mixed media paint, oil and metallic tint and resin on plywood
90x60cm
Private Collection
Tasting Notes
The fastest recorded time for an Australian sprinter over 200m was set at the Mexico Olympics of 1968.
The record stands today and the time fast enough to have scored a place on the podium at the Sydney Olympics.
The athlete in question, chose to stand in solidarity with the two Americans he shared the Mexico podium with. He wore a human’s rights badge on his Australian tracksuit.
A move that ended his career and meant, but for a documentary made by his nephew, that he would have slipped into obscurity. Though he was never invited to participate in the Sydney Olympics, he is viewed as a hero abroad by Americans. For Australians filed away, in the ‘repressed memory folder’ of the Australian nations childhood, the ‘Colonial Stockholm Syndrome, Infinite Chronicles’.
I couldn’t paint Peter… I’d sat on the idea for too long, I rushed the painting, and I didn’t have the adrenalin rush of violent potential to armour me against the heartbreak… so I painted Sidney Nolans Ned Kelly in his place.
Ned Kelly is an interesting example of oppressed people… the motive, or social situation that he endured was poor Irish catholic rebelling against the rich squattocracy of the establishment -and the British colony. His actions brought about a royal commission into police corruption.
This isn’t really why Sidney Nolan related to him, Nolan was on the run under an assumed identity, to avoid war - The outlaw helmet is symbolic, with the sky showing through, as though empty.
The image is best appreciated as a diptych alongside ‘dark emu, black swan theory’ the horizon lines mirror one another and the story of both helps explain the complexity of the issue
These images take me out into the big open space of western and central Australia. The process of making them has given me a new place inside, which is quiet and open and vast.
I had thought of calling it, ‘don’t mind the great barrier reef’ or ‘Daniel O’Connell and Fredrick Douglas on a staircase’ but really the stand taken by all three people on that day, on that podium is a thing of beauty that I am deeply moved by.
Black Swan, Head Stone
2019
mixed media paint, oils, wood stain, smoke stain, metallic tint and resin on plywood
90x 60cm
P.O.A (price on application)
Tasting Notes
A Black Swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was.
There is a dream like quality to the landscape. The objects within the landscape echo living shadows in a silver fog, a face emerges in the top left, the colour composition hints at shapes and forms that never truly reveal a design.
It is an exploration into the subverted and abusive relationship we have to our natural surrounds and problematic notions of object based wealth and status.
The abstract expressionism sits behind punk-pop symbols of culture extinct.
Jared Diamond suggests Easter Island is an example of environmental collapse from human deforestation and conservational mismanagement. Other theories about Rapa Nui suggest the depopulation a result of colonisation, disease and slavers not lumberjacks. Some even believe the island a relic of a technologically advanced super-race lost to our popular history due to some calamity.
I like to explore society’s blind spots and how we deal with our collective cognitive dissonance.
The Great Emu War
2019
mixed media paint, wood stain, oil paint and resin on plywood
60x 90cm
P.O.A (price on application)
Tasting Notes
The Great Emu War, was a military operation in 1932 in Campion an abandoned town in the wheatbelt region of Western Australia. The area today is better know for rolling droughts, desertification, endangered species and climate-change devastation.
Following World War 1, large numbers of veterans were given land by the Australian Government to take up farming in Western Australia.
With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, these farmers were encouraged to increase their wheat crops, with the government promising (and failing to deliver) assistance in the form of subsidies.
As many as 20,000 emus found that the cultivated lands were good habitat, in particular the marginal farming land afforded to veterans.
Farmers all too familiar with war, requested machine guns, soldiers armed with Lewis guns where deployed.
Although suffering a minor number of fatalities, the emu population persisted and continued to cause crop destruction, relatively unscathed.
“Mobility scandalised Europeans. Their road obliged them to fence and guard, to stay put, to make hard work a virtue. This gave great advantages, including the numbers and technology to explain why a white Australian writes this book. It also led them to condemn people who reduced their material wants, sat yarning in daylight, and gave so much time to ceremony and ritual. These were preserves and pursuits of gentry. It did not seem right that Aborigines should be like that.”
― Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth
Fart Claims Authority Over Wind
2019
mixed media paint, oils, wood stain, smoke stain, metallic tint and resin on plywood
120x 90cm
Private Collection
Tasting Notes
The term ‘bondi cigar’ evokes an image of a man dripping gold and fake tan, driving an elite sports car turned into a 4wd not fit for purpose, puffing on imported hand rolled Cuban tobacco with sugar coated nose hairs.
In truth, the expression refers to turds floating in the surf… not metaphoric ones.
On the headland at north bondi is a sewage plant. As a child, I remember it pumping raw sewage out into the ocean, something would regularly go wrong and cigars a plenty.
How we manage our waste is actually the perfect analogy for our society.
Since Sydney’s inception, its first fresh water, ‘the tank stream’ was not only named with impeccable utility but was transformed from sacred, into poisoned filth with the efficiency the name implies. The tank stream still flows, beneath the main street in the cbd.
Shit rolls down hill, it’s the number one rule of plumbing, 25mm fall in a metre
and then pump it from a holding tank to somewhere no one is looking, at least no one who matters.
Since the bondi cigar days, property prices in the area have turned what was once a rough and wild surf side suburb into an exclusive internationally renowned destination, insulated against the stink of its own shit by the watertight barrier of wealth.
So the sewage pipes were made longer, extended out in increments of kilometres. Now when the shit blows back in, it ends up in Cronulla.
This waste management scheme has been in place from the earliest days, the lion of the British empire had a human waste issue, the problem of the poor, the criminal class, the peasants, the irish, the catholics, the less fortunate…
America afforded ample opportunity for pumping refuse, until the war of independence.
And so, the main political purpose behind the creation of the Australian colony was waste management.
A jail, the palatable justification for the piping of excess humans, to a holding tank.
The second fleet where private slavers ships, people paid to deliver a cargo, paid on the number of people who where placed on the ship at point of origin… not how many where unloaded at the destination.
I think it best to tell this story through the use of imagery from my childhood story book about a vegetarian lion who loved bunnies.
Explaining Interconnectedness
2019
mixed media paint, oils, wood stain, smoke stain, metallic tint and resin on plywood
70x 94cm
P.O.A (price on application)
Tasting Notes
“Now stand aside, worthy adversary.”
BLACK KNIGHT: “'Tis but a scratch.”
“A scratch? Your arm's off!”
BLACK KNIGHT: “No, it isn't.”
“Well, what's that then?”
BLACK KNIGHT: “I've had worse.”
“You liar!”
BLACK KNIGHT: “Come on you pansy!”
The Black Knight is a fictional character who appears in 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail'. As his name suggests, he is a knight dressed in black, he guards a "bridge" (in reality a short plank of wood) over a small stream… which could have been easily stepped over by King Arthur but, for unknown reasons, he does not. Although supremely skilled in swordplay, the Black Knight suffers from unchecked overconfidence and a staunch refusal ever to give up.
The politics in Australia, over the last twenty plus years, has been dominated by climate change deniers, supported both by huge media empires, winning and fossil fuel lobby groups and self-serving corporate interest alike. Their wilful ignorance of science is perhaps explained in part, by cognitive dissonance and belief in immaculate design... but most likely greed for monetary profit. The black knight future proofed me for the trauma of the absurd.
The Colonial Stockholm Syndrome seems to be the prevailing trend, so keeping a sense of humour is perhaps the only personal freedom left.
Correction Pen
2019
Mixed Media paint, metallic tint, smoke stain, 'white out' correction pen and resin on recycled plywood
49x 62cm
P.O.A (price on application)
Tasting Notes
“Sometimes a decade arrives when nations have the chance to turn away from bigotry and selfishness and turn to their countrymen and women and embrace them as loved members of the human family. But do we have the ticker for it?”
Bruce Pascoe, Convincing Ground: Learning to fall in love with your country
The Merino Sheep has been appropriated from the former two dollar note where it was displayed beside John Macarthur (a remarkably dodgy individual).
The sheep is painted in ‘white out - correction marker’ its introduction to our lands resulted in the fertile spongy absorbent soils being trodden flat and turned into packed dirt, the wealth of top soil mined beyond recognition.
In a landscape otherwise barren, black and blue, stained with turps smoke, there are streaks of metallic sheen hinting at mineral wealth.
The arc of a rainbow or banner could also be fire.
To see where we are headed we need to have a firm grasp of where we are, the reality of the situation we are in, and also, the trajectory our past has put us on.
This country as 'Australia' began as a penal colony… a correction pen
Strangelove Black Swan Bomber
2019
mixed media paint, oils, wood stain, smoke stain and resin on recycled plywood
60x 60cm
Private Collection
Tasting Notes
“Any reduction of the world around us can have explosive consequences since it rules out some sources of uncertainty; it drives us to a misunderstanding of the fabric of the world. For instance, you may think that radical Islam (and its values) are your allies against the threat of Communism, and so you may help them develop, until they send two planes into downtown Manhattan.”
‘The Black Swan; The Impact of the Highly Improbable’ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
In this piece, i have kept the colour choice to a minimum.
Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film ‘Dr. Strangelove or; How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” is shot in black and white, it greatly influenced the minimal colour choice, blue and yellow, black and white and a single small dash of red. Early on in the creation of this piece, I set it on fire, the smoke stain still present on the left side of the image.
Strangelove is a work of both prophetic genius and utter hilarity, and is one of my all time favourite films. it is especially relevant today; mutually assured destruction (MAD) with the added absurdity of climate change!
I See Nothing, I Know Nothing
2019
mixed media paint, oils, wood stain, smoke stain, metallic tint and resin on plywood
60x 90cm
P.O.A
Tasting Notes;
This is not historical re-enactment but a fishing expedition.
"I see nothing! I hear nothing! I know nothing!" Sergeant Schultz Hogan's Heroes
Blanco Miasma
2019
mixed media paint, oils, wood stain, smoke stain, metallic tint and resin on plywood
60x 90cm
Private Collection
Tasting Notes
“this stain is deep in our chalk”, Bruce Pascoe’s ‘Dark Emu’.
As a child, I would skate through the car parks of unit blocks.
The one closest to my home was risky because of this one particular old lady.
Once I hit the entrance driveway with the rumbling percussion of concrete ballet, I was aware the kettle was on the boil.
When it was done, heated to steaming she would pour it
over her balcony.
She never bothered to talk or even shout. She just wanted to hurt us, scare us, intimidate us… I guess.
The old lady on the upper level balcony, pouring blistering hate. Splashing against my naked shins as I rattle and crash.
I have never given away as many copies of a book in my life as I have of ‘Dark Emu’ by Bruce Pascoe.
Turns out Tasmania once had Emu’s as well as tigers.
Turns out I quite like the sound of skateboards.
Shooting Stars
2019
mixed media paint, oils, wood stain, metallic tint and resin on plywood
60x 90cm
P.O.A
Queen of Eden: Two Fold Bay
2019
this image is a reproduction of the original which occurs on form ply stepped out off the wall. available as a print on request
flat on paper 80x 48cm
original 185x 120 x17cm
P.O.A
Tasting Notes
The only recorded history of Killer Whales and people hunting in orchestrated harmony occurred on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia.
Like a catholic church lead light, if the catholic church wasn’t shit… a shrine to nature, existing with a symbiosis and mutualism in a place of worship.
Old Tom the lead Orca would come into the bay, make a ruckus to wake up or attract the whalers, then lead them out, often grabbing a toe rope off the stern if the row boat was too slow, and dragging the harpooner’s out to a trapped pod of baleen whales.
It is most probable that these relationships where nurtured and fostered well before recorded white history, how far back in time this union may have gone is a wonder to speculate.