Art-making memoir 3

The umbra of trees

I had wanted to record the umbra of whole forests but the practical limits of cost and scale, the ethical constraints of paper use and chemical waste and the aesthetic need for visual coherence meant representing  ecological systems with individual specimens. In most places, even this modest goal became a test of planning, perspiration and patience as much as photographic skill. The methodology and challenges of creating a print in Tasmania in the autumn of 1993 were typical of those that became the series (re-phrasing Martin Buber) I, Terra, Thou.

I had backpacked provisions and camping gear, a pre-cut three-metre long sheet of photographic paper rolled in a light-tight PVC pipe, a dolphin torch covered with a red ‘safelight’ filter, a portable flash unit and flash meter, a camera tripod, six metre-lengths of aluminium angle, six metres of sealing wire, pliers, gaffa tape, extra guy ropes and tent pegs, a bunch of clothespins and a measuring tape to a botanically rare sub-alpine woodland under Cradle Mountain. A delightful head-high snarl of deciduous beech Nothofagus gunnii (fittingly nicknamed tanglefoot), Australia’s only temperate winter deciduous native tree, its diminutive, crinkled leaves, a blaze of yellow, orange, russet and red, bordered the tarn next to my tent. Wind and drizzle the first two days kept me camp-bound. The third dawned still and clear but I awoke to discover my walking boots missing. Drag marks in the lichen next to the tent fly indicated the getaway direction. A hurried barefoot search located one and then the other in bushes on the other side of the tarn. Teeth indents pointed to the culprit: a Tasmanian Devil who decided tanned leather, glue and grimy rubber tainted with man sweat wasn’t so tasty after all. For the rest of the morning, I worked to establish the positioning of my proposed paper image based on the imagined focus, density and overlapping shadow-fall of the intended composition. In the afternoon I assembled the aluminium uprights tensioned by the guy ropes linked by a cross wire for holding the photosensitive material and stationed a flash unit atop the tripod aimed at the subject a measured distance away. After nightfall, guided by the amber glow of my torch, I carefully unrolled the paper, pegging it to the wire as I wove it in and out of the branches and leaves according to plan, scrupulously avoiding damage to the plant. Where I wanted sharp rendering the paper was pressed firmly against the branches and leaves in front of it; to create blur, I bent the imaging surface apart from the subject. Finally arranged, I fired the pre-calibrated flash pulse and returned the exposed paper to its lightproof tube. The next day, I disassembled the scaffold, packed and carried everything out. Eventually returning to the mainland darkroom I developed and toned the latent image by hand in tubs. The tanglefoot piece retained peg marks from its wire support; forest images made elsewhere in Tasmania, at Werribee Gorge, Kinglake and the Brisbane Ranges in Victoria sported their supports plus holes from abrasion, embedded vegetative material, stains from mud, sap and insects.

Chance always played its part. At Werribee Gorge for instance, my assistant and I hung three sheets of photographic paper from the scaffold we had erected before dark, by pegging them to the cross wire supports behind our subject, a graceful, mature Casuarina. As we were finishing the set-up, the full moon rose above the horizon almost perfectly perpindicular to the image plane, its light silhouetting the tree against the wall of illuminated white paper. I’d forgotten to consult the lunar calendar. I asked my assistant to stand on the ladder and press his hands and torso against the back of the middle sheet so the paper touched the trunk of the tree. This would maximize shadowing (lighter tonality) and image sharpness along the bole. I let the moon offer its benedictions for half an hour before firing the flash, reset a third less bright than I would have without the moon. The resulting triptych possessed an uncanny opalescence. When he first saw these ‘ecological shadowgrams’, my senior MA supervisor, photo-media educator and artist Les Walkling perceptively quipped, ”the landscape has become the camera”. 

On a subsequent project in Tasmania, I wanted to record precipitation. Envisaged as a meditation on the vulnerability of rainforest and sub-alpine woods and heaths in the normally wet highlands of western Tasmania to anthropogenic climate change, The Rain was hampered, ironically, by unprecedented drought likely related to the very problem the project addressed. Unlike human affairs, the trajectory of global warming can now be broadly predicted so that what historian Caitlin DeSilvey calls an “anticipatory history” of ecological futures can now be realistically foretold. Computer modelling indicates a steady decline in the conditions conducive to Tasmania’s humid ecosystems, an anticipatory history confirmed by weather during the project and unparalleled fires across the region ten years later in 2016.

Meringur Flora and Fauna Reserve, a three-square-kilometre patch of uncleared bush in Victoria’s semi-arid Mallee, was the subject of two projects. In the first, Contact, I imagined the relict rectangle to be a genius loci (the classical idea that place can be the habitat of a deity or presence) perceived through incompatible colonial and contemporary eyes. I used film rather than paper because its transparency allowed for replication by contact and the emulsion could be hand-engraved with a woodcarving needle. The inscriptions quoted ecological publications, local headstones and nineteenth-century literature, including the journals of squatters and explorers. The en plein air originals were copied by contact in the studio into tonally reversed positives, most of which were sandwiched together to create multi-layered, composites or palimpsests replicating the shape of the reserve, like maps. At the project’s first public showing in Mildura, I received a note from the director conveying comments by artist Mike Parr who, having just seen it, described my array of door-sized backlit translucent films hanging from the gallery ceiling as being like “the flayed skin of the earth”.

A second Meringur project, Down in the poor country, was a series of singular, multi-layered and multi-segmented films (some remade and sandwiched together in the studio) recording the untidy woodland, grassland and saltbush that does not lend itself to naked-eye representation. When, in his 1927 piece The Poor, Poor Country, poet John Shaw Neilson penned “Down in that poor country no pauper was I”, he was proclaiming his love for the parched, infertile, half-cleared Mallee and his uncertain faith in the redemptive power of love itself. Like the poet, the juxtaposed and fragmented layered, pin-sharp and blurred images suggest riches beyond appearances, riches perpetually veiled at the threshold of revelation or erasure. Two Meringur pieces, one a 14-sheet and the other a 6-layer sandwich of films recording Belah trees Casuarina pauper have been digitally reiterated as inkjet print enlargements.