Retrospective

It is excessively difficult to say what my work means. There has been so much to work through. I came back to art in 2022 after 41 years away from art. Those years were a difficult period but while I learned many skills that can be useful I am still yet to alchemise the trauma resulting from a forced abandonment of my destiny. The lesson for me was to never allow that to happen again, regardless of the cost.

I began writing in 2007 because I had been writing since graduating in humanities in 1985. Writing in different jobs, apart from a couple of sales roles. Writing the threshold is lower than for art, for writing you just need a desk a chair and computer. Art you need a lot more things and a lot more space. So writing came first, particularly formal poetry. Formal poetry is a kind of puzzle and in any case you have to abandon part of your agency in order to follow the rhyme scheme. It felt more natural for me to do this abandonment because that is what I had done for so long in order to fit in. In order to join the rat race, raise a family, earn a living.

In 2022 when I came back to art I already had hundreds of poems, and I had lots of photographs. I could easily take more photos as photography nis like writing easy, you carry your studio around in your hand. “Camera” even means “room” in Italian. So the studio is portable. I added poems to photos until October when I started a communal activity with collage. The collage was always about doing art with other people, I had started Eastern Suburbs Art Group in July of that year. The collage was an Esag project. 

This year I started to analyse my practice which is what they tell you to do in art school, though I only ever did a couple of practical units as part of my BA. The analysis has been long lived, I have written 10s of thousands of words and am not yet finished. I start to see patterns though, one of which is the kind of amateur impulse that has always been behind collage. When Picasso and Braque adopted collage 110 years ago they were stealing authenticity from an already established genre, but one that resided outside the professional domain of high art. Like my Esag collage effort. Just a bunch of people making stuff.

The paramontage is harder to explain. The word from an old school friend Andrew Adair who is a poet in Canberra. Paramontage meaning beyond montage. Like collage montage belongs to the avant garde of early last century, specifically the Swiss dada movement of the 1920s. Pop artists also used collage and montage a lot in their work. With collage there is the idea of repurposing, respecting something by using it. Something that is not use is not respected. I reuse the poems in the paramontage, I reuse newsprint in collage. My art is about respecting what would otherwise be overlooked. Maybe this is what it is about. I even hesitate to take new photos, instead reusing photos from years back even though storing photos on a computer takes up no space at home. We live in a world of excess, it is nice to slow down.