Sunday 12 February 2012

Coast


Coast-a series of photographs 
"The image survives the subject and becomes the remembered reality."
John Szarkowski (Director of Photography Department, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1962 – 1991
The images included in this exhibition have been made over a number of trips to a stretch of the NSW South Coast. The coast always holds fond memories from youth and is often the first experience of a natural environment away from suburban lives. The coast is an infinite adventure full of small nooks, hidden paths, smells, the changing kaleidoscope of sky, sea and forest and the excitement of a new day. The crescent inlets of the south coast appear as a child vast and seemingly endless and allow for continual exploration. In retrospect they are intimate spaces easily traversed. There is something spiritual in the feel, smell and sound of the coast and the dramatic plunging of the forest into the dunes and onto the ocean. Why does the sea and beach hold such importance in our imagination and memory? What do we desire from proximity to the sea? How are our memories formed by beach trips? Joseph Campbell wrote-

“We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with his planet”.

The original photographs themselves were all made using Kodak Tri X film-a relic of another era-which in itself is part of a changing past. Film is a finite resource and forces a slowing down of image making. There are long periods of watching and the careful arranging of the images. The prints have been made using archival photographic paper and inks. They are editioned in a series of 10 in the sizes 20 by 30 and 30 by 40 cm.

Time in childhood is fluid from racing to quietude, intensely physical and languid. The viewpoint of the images is low and the focus selective. The intention is to draw the viewer into a private world-every day refreshed but the constancy ever present. As each day passes at the coast we see life and death constantly paraded.

The spiritual world is a decidedly troublesome concept in intellectual thought today. The word itself is difficult to use in the politicised, thin skinned, touchy world of contemporary scholarship and criticism. We whisper it as some people once whispered “sex”. But spiritual does not suggest any kind of close-mindedness, any kind of fundamentalism, or even of deity, for that matter. In using the word, I am not speaking of any religious movement, but merely of reverence, mythic reverence, for things that for centuries have been revered. They are things which, except in sleep and dream, we seem to have forgotten this century”. 
“ which is a way of translating thoughts into the language of feeling… it evokes the poignancy implicit in the transitoriness of all things”
John Wood