Art-making memoir 5
Picturing Heaven
Saline Lake Tyrrell in the semi-arid Mallee reputedly once served as a celestial observatory for the Boorong clan of the Wergaia-speaking people. The heavens mirrored in its saline shallows enunciated a sacred reciprocity between sky and country, a reciprocity ruptured by clearing and colonization. This pre-history is reflected in the indigenous origins of the lake’s name, ‘dyrille’, meaning ‘a space opening to the sky’ analogous to the khôra (a re-generative, receptive space) of classical Greek myth and philosophy. The story became the driving metaphor for my work: to enunciate the lost reciprocation of the earth with heaven by re-instating the lakebed as an imaging surface recording the sky. By turning the lake’s surface into a photographic focal plane/plain, reciprocating the night sky in a ceremonial imaging process, I wanted to honour the lost Boorong rite and offer a metaphor for our global ecological predicament. I thought of it as poetic restoration. An ersatz re-yoking or realignment of the lost reciprocity of earth with sky.
The project started with a chance encounter at Mildura Airport with scholar and writer Paul Carter who, upon hearing me wax lyrical about starry Mallee nights (I’d just completed a stint making shadowgrams at Meringur) told me the Boorong story. Championed by Paul, advised by astrophysicist Maurizio Toscano, funded by back-to-back state and federal arts grants, and enabled by the labour of a score of volunteers, fieldwork commenced in April 2007.
On nights free of reflected solar light, large sheets of gelatin silver film were placed under pre-recorded images, laid out on the lakebed and exposed to the naked light of the stars. The majority of prepared images were of two kinds: rare old ‘14-inch’ (356 mm) square astronomical glass plate negatives made by telescopes at Mount Palomar (California) and Siding Spring (NSW) borrowed by Maurizio, our project astronomer, on my behalf from University of Melbourne astrophysicist Rachel Webster’s private collection; and my own film shadowgrams of live native invertebrates gathered from the lake’s shore, created on earlier field trips. In addition, there were carbon powder prints on paper and the chemical trace on photographic film of an emu’s feet made on a farm near the lake and two dancers’ skin as they performed on the lakebed in daylight. It took sixteen site visits over three years to complete the fieldwork. Like other projects that preceded it, the collective nature of the process made the act of imaging both possible, and ritual-like.
From the air or a map, Lake Tyrrell looks like an infant. The top of the newborn head, her fontanelle where cranial bones remain temporarily unknitted to accommodate a child’s growing brain, was where we were. Maurizio had mapped this night and the next as the only ones of the season where ambient starlight rather than reflected sunlight from the moon or planets would be the main celestial light. I had spent the previous week in my blackened darkroom meticulously packing each of the dozen fragile astronomical glass plates and twelve other pre-made shadowgram negatives into its custom-made felt-lined wooden holder sandwiched between a clear glass pressure plate on top and a same-sized sheet of fresh photographic film underneath. I had wrapped each holder in a lightproof black plastic bag sealed with Velcro straps, numbered and packed in padded instrument boxes, eight to a box. Once on site, my assistants and I pegged down a line of tarpaulins abutted and arranged east to west on the hard brine lake floor, an orientation intended to minimize the deposition of salt residues carried by prevailing night-time southerlies on any individual plate.
Before dusk, after the tarps had been set, a pair of volunteers carried each instrument box to the exposure area. All instruments bar the timer were turned off to prevent accidental exposure of the films. Being panchromatic films, there were no safelights. Our eyes soon adjusted to seeing by starlight grounded by the salt sea luminance to our south. Deep in the night in full darkness, we lifted the wrapped holders from the boxes and laid them neatly in line on the tarps. At the appointed moment the timer was started as each holder was unwrapped one by one down the line and opened to the light of the night sky. We reclined on tarps nearby for the hour-long exposure, far longer than the metered time of seven minutes to compensate for the slowed response of the analogue emulsion, its ‘reciprocity failure’ to such dim light: incidental metaphor for broken earth-sky reciprocity. Our small talk gradually faded into silence as we beheld the uninterrupted dome of heaven overhead: we were transfixed by the sweep of the Milky Way reflected in the line of glass plates as they absorbed its light. For that hour Jupiter hugged the horizon. To ensure identical exposures, when the time was up the holders were re-closed and re-wrapped in the same order they had been opened before being returned to their respective boxes. With the aid of torchlight, the tarps were rolled up and they and the boxes were then carried back to the vehicles for transport home and processing of the exposed films. The newborn stars and terrestrial objects were safe.
Like all elemental silver found on Earth, that in these projects’ artworks was forged aeons ago by stellar nucleosynthesis. Exposed to the night sky, the invisible silver halides of the unexposed films were transformed into visible metal literally by the light of the universe. The images were and are a gelatin silver membrane of congealed starlight: a haunting vision of relationality.
In homage to Tyrrell history, one moonless night after the star-exposures were done, I submerged a sheet of gelatin silver film in the lakes’ turbid shallows and exposed it to the bare starlight supplemented by a pulse of flash. The resulting shadowed particles and muddied diffraction looked uncannily like the night sky above. I called it Refraction.
Each film in the inaugural series, Syzygy, (a ‘yoking of opposites’ or an ‘alignment of three or more celestial objects’) was mounted on a pane of low-iron, super-clear glass of similar size to the appropriated astronomical plates. The pieces carrying the project name consist of invertebrate and astronomical plates, most of which have a circular black mask screen-printed on the reverse face. Shifting viewpoints optically displace underlying layers producing sensations of parallax depth and orbital movement. Tyrrell’s invertebrates are relics of its pre-colonial ecology. Juxtaposing tiny insects with ancient sky provokes uncanny correspondences between near and far, abject and sublime, organic agency and cosmic eternity. At their first full-scale showing in Morbis Artis: Diseases of the Arts at RMIT Gallery in Melbourne over the summer of 2016-17, the plates were grouped into eighteen horizontally aligned stacks displayed ‘in syzygy’ (paired and/or aligned) in an unlit room, backlit atop abutting lightboxes. Flay, the minor series, reiterates the body imprints. It inverts the conventional presentation of landscape as an anthropic sign by alluding to correspondences between poignant, salt-flecked veneers of human flesh and the eviscerated skin of the salt country upon which they were made.
Dancing on Mars traced the imprints of a performer dancing across photographic film on the dry bed of Lake Tyrrell in daylight, her feet wet with sodium thiosulphate ‘fixer’, which chemically dissolved the undeveloped silver in the emulsion. These films were then used to make contact prints on fresh films under starlight, some of which were mounted on glass, like the Syzygy pieces. Human footprints carry many meanings. Baseness. Work. Travel. Joy. According to astrobiologists, periodically dry, pink, hypersaline Lake Tyrrell is a model for what life might exist on Mars because the lake’s subsurface minerals and microbes closely resemble primordial saline habitats on earth. Except for its invertebrates, much of the above-surface life that once thrived around Lake Tyrrell has been destroyed by clearing and colonization. Dancing on Lake Tyrrell was like dancing on Mars.
Tyrrell Dark Emu is a suite of diptychs pairing negative film chemograms recording the emu footprints with their contact-printed positive ‘shadows’ exposed by the stars: one of the celestial sets overlays a familial spinal x-ray. Writer Bruce Pascoe coined the phrase ‘dark emu’ to describe the indigenous Australian conception of the dark zones of the Milky Way, a celestial spectre of the flightless bird Dromaius novaehollandiae apparent to anyone peering skyward on clear, dark Antipodean nights. It is a vision redolent of the vast and varied corpus of lore linking earth and sky found in all pre-modern cosmologies.
The film diptych Fate manifests at six identifiable mortals: the late photographer Masahisa Fukase to whom my re-rendering of his seraphic ravens pays homage, and me, the photographer of two other lives, the reclining figure and gliding heron. Then there are the twentieth-century astro-photographers responsible for the celestial glass plate originals I have ritually re-exposed on these films by contact under starlight on the dry salt-bed of the Mallee’s Lake Tyrrell: one of the Dumbbell Nebula made at the Palomar Observatory and the other of constellation Carina captured at the Siding Spring Observatory. There may be other beings on other worlds somewhere in these heavenward views but they are, as yet, unknown to us. If they exist, fate awaits them too. In The Ravens triptych each of the star-exposed films has been laser cut into a circle and engraved with imagery derived from camera photographs I made in 2018 of flying ravens hunting Bogong Moths at Mount Buffalo: a celestial link to invertebrate fate. I have had the left hand Carina half of the pair scanned and printed as an inkjet enlargement.
Instructions for Mending the World joins films of muslin fabric created in the studio with others replicating astronomical plates exposed by starlight at Lake Tyrrell. The literal threads from which the cloths were woven offer metaphors for connection and repair reminiscent of the mystical Kabbalist’s call for Tikkun olam: to ‘mend the world’. The solace of vast space and numberless stars invites us to consider what such repair implies: redemption, not for any of us personally, but for our species and for the web of living and inanimate kin we share this precious blue orb with, and depend upon: vegetative, animal, fungi and microbe, sea and soil, stone, ice, river and air. Juxtaposed with each other, these shadows of quotidian and cosmic fabric provoke thoughts of a shared, ineffable wellspring. Which film in each piece constitutes the ‘instructions’ and which is for ‘mending’ is undefined, just as what distinguishes the why from the how of reality remains unknowable to us now, and probably always will.
Elegy is fifty star-exposed astronomical films laser-cut into circles encapsulated in Mylar envelopes. The Mylars have been laser-engraved with the words of Elegy written by my wife the poet Annie Mairead Hunter. The making of this (as yet unfinished) work was a ritual of grief and hope: a photo-kinesthetic coda for lost and imagined worlds. The plan is to display the films suspended in contorted alignment, like a worm, a snake or bent telescope. Sequenced by azimuth position from north to south the films and the words that overlay them will allude to the possibility of tragic catharsis.