Essay One
Learning to See
When people ask about my work they often begin with the natural inks. What plant made that colour? How do you extract the ink? How long does it take?
They are good questions, and I enjoy answering them. Making inks from vegetation has become an important part of my practice. But I have realised that the inks are not where the story begins. The story begins with learning to see.
Twenty-five years ago my husband and I moved onto a property with trees and bushland. We chose it because we loved the feeling of being surrounded by nature. We treasured it. We enjoyed looking at it from a distance. Like many Australians, we referred to it simply as "the bush." We also tried to tame it.
Kunzea, or teatree, was something to pull out. Fallen branches were debris or firewood. It was a convenient hidden place for a bone yard. The landscape was a pleasant backdrop to our lives, but we knew little about it. Only recently we discovered that our property contains rare and endangered vegetation. Friends with ecological knowledge began walking with us. What had once appeared to be an undifferentiated landscape slowly became an intricate community. We found the tiniest of orchids we had never noticed. Mosses and rare lichens that had silently occupied the same places for years. More than sixty varieties of fungi appeared and disappeared over a single season. Native grasses swayed in the wind. Each walk seemed to uncover another layer of surprises.
Nothing had changed in the landscape. The change had happened in me. I realised that I had been looking without really seeing.
That discovery has slowly aligned itself to the way I think about art. It would be easy to think that making natural inks has taught me more about plants. It hasn’t. I still don’t know their common or botanical names. But it has taught me to become more attuned to them. While this is true, it misses something much more important.
The materials are not the basis of my art. Attention is.
When I gather bark, leaves or seeds now, I do so differently. I have always been aware of the minimalist nature of taking and have never taken more than I need. Instead now, I ask what it means to gather with specific care and concern. Sometimes that means walking away empty-handed. Sometimes it means experiencing a bull ant bite as an unforgettable reminder that entering another place without attention may bring something untoward as well.
The inks I make carry the colours of a particular landscape, but more importantly they carry the quality of attention that brought them into being. Is this true of all artistic practice…or of even a life practice. Perhaps the medium matters less than the way we have learned to look.
A painter may spend years understanding the changing light across a hillside. A ceramic artist may know the feel of clay so intimately that tiny changes in moisture become immediately apparent. A photographer may notice a fleeting relationship between shadow and form that everyone else walks past. A textile person can touch the weave of fabric in their hand and feel inspired.
The medium is different. The attention is shared.
I don't think the greatest transformation in my practice has been learning how to make better work. It has been learning how to become a better observer. For once seen, you can choose to ignore but you can never un-see.
The artworks are one expression of that learning.
In an everyday sense, I used to see wattle as yellow flowers. I had no idea that we had different species nor that different species carried entirely different flower and leaf forms. Once I began noticing, I could never return to just seeing “wattle”.
Now I think seeing is something we practise as rich attention. To engage we need to slow down. To become familiar with a place. To recognise relationships rather than objects. To notice, in its stillness, what has been there all along.
Perhaps that is why I continue to return to spaces around our property. Not because I expect to find something new every time…but strangely I do. I am slowly becoming more enlightened about attentive seeing. To be comfortable in holding a thread of thought and weave it through my imagination about what I am paying attention to.
The landscape has become my caregiver as much as I care for it.
The materials are not the focus. Attention is.