Artist in Residency 2010

Cataract Gorge Artist in Residence Application, 13 September to 3 October 2010.

In seeking a residency as an artist at the Kings Bridge Gorge Cottage, Cataract Gorge, Tasmania, I wish to continue, through my paintings, drawings, and other media, an investigation of the importance of place in our human existence; the historical, topographic specificity of a site and the cultural, social and imaginative life we experience and participate in with it.

A visit at the beginning of 2008 sparked my interest in the Gorge and a sense of the multiple layerings of human and other activity that have visited the locality since its geologic creation as well as the many perspectives it offers to both short and long term inhabitants and neighbours. With a muti-facetted Launceston at its fringes and visitors travelling through from around the world, the Cataract Gorge contains many different realities within its length, breadth and depth and as it has traversed the annals of time.

Over the last decade my art work has explored familiar Melbourne suburban settings, often with surreal interpretations, but with a slow spiralling out from my home suburb to overseas and imaginary lands and environments. A number of the resulting "landscape tableaux" have drawn on references from art history, film, and literature and involve an ongoing dialogue between actual and imagined experience. Each art work has contained a new land to discover and explore through shifting aerial perspectives that are fluid and interchangeable; mapping out experiences, memories, relationships and desires.

It is my hope to extend this practice at Cataract Gorge through sketching (both on paper and through digital photography), note-taking, works on paper and oil on canvas. This intensive period of work will then be followed up after the residency with larger works in oil and other media leading to an exhibition in 2011. Due to my work with people who are blind or with low vision I will also take the opportunity to make digital audio recordings and collect other material to assist in creating a more inclusive, multi-sensory installation piece.

I am very happy to fulfil all Artist in Residence Program requirements and criteria and am interested in offering open studio sessions on the Saturday or Sunday afternoons of my residency and / or an evening talk about my art practice, making use of work in progress and a power point presentation of previous related work, at an appropriate location. I am happy to follow any guidance from Council Officers in this regard.