Art-making memoir 2
The Wave
The vision of it arrived in a daydream, vague and unformed, as I swam laps, in the cyan scintillations of hot sunlight refracting in the tiled depths of a suburban outdoor swimming pool, in the spring of 1993. It re-appeared, full-formed and lucid, in a sleeping dream, the following year when I was visiting Poland, the birthplace of my father and maternal grandparents, and then again, the night my mother died. The apparition of an immense, Hokusai-like breaking ocean wave imprinted, on paper, at life-scale. It took fourteen months of designing, experimenting, fabricating, organising, in-kind help from friends and mounting credit card debt, to attempt to realise.
Twenty-six of us gathered at Bushrangers Bay, a wild cliff-rimmed ocean beach in Bunurong country one hundred kilometres south of Melbourne. It was the day and then it was the night of the 1996 summer solstice. I was directing the first of five nocturnal immersions in seawater of a fresh 24-square metre ‘raft’ of black and white photographic paper each time between that December eve and the June winter solstice. News of the project, The Wave, had spread fast. The month before, I had invited friends and asked students at the three institutions where I was teaching photography, to participate as volunteers. They told their friends: other artists, photographers, environmental activists, tradies, academics, labourers, shop assistants. Learning of my plans, Deborah Ely, then director of the Australian Centre for Photography (ACP) in Sydney, sent money for us to be able to chronicle the event: young documentary filmmakers Joelle Baudet and Bruce Chapman were there too.
That hot and windless afternoon we trudged across the dunes carrying more than 100 kilograms of photographic paper, equipment and provisions. On the sandy beach, we formed teams laying out and screwing together the four outer oregon timber beams of the raft. Then, we stretched the custom-made nylon fishing net between and over the timber rim and attached the tensioning stainless steel crosswires, tightened with marine turnbuckles. Finally, the three legs of the aluminium tower topped by the flash units were attached to hinges on the raft’s perimeter.
The raft was 6.8 long x 4.9 metres across: the flash tower, the ‘mast,’ 8 metres high when erect. At sunset, we shared a potluck on the beach. Two hours later, I asked everyone to turn their torches and camera flashes off to protect the photographic paper from accidental exposure. Guided by dolphin lamps with red safelight filters, we slid each of the three pre-cut rolls of photographic paper out of their PVC light-proof storage pipes and lay them, end to end, atop the shorter, near timber perimeter, of the raft. Three teams of volunteers, one per roll, crouched horizontally, spread-eagled and shoeless across the net to minimize pressure. Gingerly, each group slowly unrolled their sheet, emulsion-side up, in turn, across the length of the raft, sewing the edges into the net beneath (and passed under the stainless steel cross-cables, above), with steel bag needles and nylon fishing line. Sew-in complete, I wrote The Wave Poem, which I had composed, onto the paper with a whiteboard marker: the black ink would shade the emulsion beneath from exposure before washing off in the brine. On some subsequent wave events, the words were typed on acetate and stapled to the paper before immersion:
Wading the sublittoral
Quadrat 38029’40” 144054’30” South of the East
Perce Rock
New Atlantis
Point Lobos
Monk by the Sea
Where Bunurong gathered shellfish
Pressure
Fetch
Photo-synthesis
Freehold to tideline
Theoria Sacra Undarum
The Sacred Theory of the Wave
In the days before, in my home darkroom shed, I had prepared, pre-cut and rolled the delicate fibre paper sheets and done the calibrations to establish the parameters of exposure, contrast control, filtration over the flash and so on. But I had misread the tide charts. At midnight, the tide wasn’t advancing but leaving. It was no longer five metres to the waves but over twenty and creeping out further by the minute. We would have to carry the heavy raft much further than anticipated. All available hands stood around the raft’s four sides. Volunteers pulled away the black plastic sheeting we had covered the paper with for safety after the sewing-on. In unison, everyone cupped their hands under the timber nestled in the warm sand and lifted the raft to hip level, the rumpled surface of shiny white photographic paper glinting in the starlight. Step by step we walked the raft to the water’s edge and laid it on the sloping sand. Each person then collected a piece of kelp and placed it on the raft’s seaward edge, some of which I rearranged. The flash power button was activated, the tower was raised into the air and locked in place. Everyone again surrounded the raft and raised it, more carefully now because the flimsy flash tower needed to be kept from wobbling or prematurely firing. Ever so gently we walked the raft into the water.
It was a hot night, and the cool saltwater on bare feet was a relief. The low tide meant the shallows extended further out than anticipated. We continued out to waist level and stopped, allowing the heavy raft to sink slowly to the bottom. Everyone stepped back. I held the homemade trigger device over my head; it was connected by wire to the flash, and I waited for the next wave. As it passed over, the kelp wafted, as I’d hoped. But I waited. The next wave was more energetic, and as it crossed the raft I pressed the red button and the flash went off. All was ablaze for a millisecond. A cheer went up all round. Collective delight. Underwater pressure had snapped one of the beams, and the paper was beginning to tear. The assemblage might break up, further puncturing the paper if we tried lifting it; so, with heads and shoulders dunked underwater, a group of volunteers dragged the raft to shore. The flash tower was lowered and deactivated and the soggy photographic paper—strewn with sand, detritus and jellyfish—was re-rolled into the pipes. We disassembled the raft and packed.
As we made our way, weary, to our vehicles, walking the track under the waxing quarter moon, a young volunteer—who would later become one of the country’s most respected conservation campaigners—took my sleeve, turned to me and said, “this has been the most spiritual experience I’ve ever had.” Others nodded. The next day, arts journalist Susan McCulloch, who had seen us on the beach from afar, phoned to ask whether it was art or science. I began to appreciate that this homage to the sea wasn’t just an environmental photography experiment. It had become, for some of us, transformative, a ritual, a liminal experience.
The majority of artworks I made in the project are life-scale shadows of churning seawater, foam, kelp, detritus and sub-marine light refraction, overlaid by the linear marks of the marine cables that held the raft taught, the imprint of paper enfolded by backwash, film negatives, handwritten texts and diagrams on acetate stapled or applied to the paper surface before submersion and various post-development chemical and pencilled modifications. On each of the five immersions between December 1996 and June1997, I tweaked the parameters of flash intensity and filtration to alter tonal depth and contrast, and on each occasion the ocean and the season were different.
Accidents played their part. For instance, in preparing the fourth wave, as on prior events, after sew-in was complete, I asked people to deposit a piece of kelp from the beach on to the paper. We then carried the raft into the chill June waters, and allowed it to sink to the bottom. Holding the flash trigger, I waited for the next wave. As it churned across the paper and the kelp wafted, as I’d hoped, I pressed the flash button. It didn’t fire. I pressed it again. It still didn’t go off. The soft fibre paper would disintegrate in the swell if immersed too long. I pressed the flash button a third time. All was ablaze for a millisecond, just as the kelp washed off the raft and the wave front passed. For the wave recording on this night, unlike any other, a chance technical glitch directed the outcome. I processed the paper in my darkroom shed. As expected, without a wave or kelp, the image was relatively featureless. I immersed one of the three sheets in iron toner, which rendered it blue. I doused another in sulphur, turning it muddy red. The results are less figurative records than colour fields, honouring their subject. Needless to admit, none of the five wave events achieved the picture I had had in my mind’s eye of a single majestic wave’s crashing shadow imprinted across the whole raft. Instead, my fantasy was redeemed with delicate fragments.
Midway into the project in February 1997, Isobel Crombie, then curator of photography at the National Gallery of Victoria, introduced me to Portuguese polymath Jorge Calado, who happened to be in Melbourne looking for photography about the sea for a forthcoming global survey show. Jorge brokered funding for the project’s completion by the Expo ’98 committee in Lisbon, Portugal. The raw results were displayed at the ACP (accompanied by the video documentary) for Australian Perspecta 1997, and in 1998 key pieces were included in Waterproof/A Prova de Água at Lisbon’s riverside Belem Cultural Centre. In a weird coincidence, shortly after I had completed the fieldwork, a sixteenth century Portuguese coin was found at Bushrangers Bay. The object was almost certainly left by sailors whose ship had departed from a wharf on the Tagus in front of the building where The Wave was on show, an event commemorating the 500th anniversary of those very voyages of exploration.
In the early 2000s, I trimmed the peeling rough edges off some of the larger raw paper works and cut others into smaller, more visually coherent objects. In addition to the two-dimensional works, I had the beach sand and detritus ‘captured’ by the paper during the five immersions that accumulated in the tubs during processing in the darkroom, kiln-dried into a cube and encased in glass. A solo presentation of this revised material was exhibited at what was then the Monash Gallery of Art (now the Museum of Australian Photography) in 2004.
The subtitle I gave the project, Theoria Sacra Undarum (The Sacred Theory Of The Wave), parodies Thomas Burnet’s biblical flood-based conjectures on topographical genesis, published in 1681: Telluris Theoria Sacra: The Sacred Theory of the Earth. Despite Burnet’s disdain for the wild, the sheer grandeur of his observations inadvertently generated public fascination with nature and greatly influenced later Romantic ideas. The Wave was an immersion of culture in nature and an encounter with the sacramental, uncertainty, place, wildness – and grief.