Essay Two
Working With
Working with always asks more of us than working on.
When I first began making natural inks, I thought I was illuminating an Australian colour perspective within the UK based study I was doing as well as exploring materials behaviour. How different plants produced different colours. How long an extraction might take. Which leaves created soft greys and which bark produced rich browns.
Those discoveries delighted me and I smugly enjoyed the Australian-ness of my presentations. They were only the beginning. The deeper wisdom wasn't about colour. It was about relationship.
For much of my life my attention was occupied by living. There were decisions to make. Problems to solve. Responsibilities to carry. The world became something I needed to manage. I had little room left to meet it.
When we moved to our property…
A branch became firewood.
Kunzia became something to remove.
When was it going to rain to fill our tanks (a first time experience. Yet to see a storm charging towards you fills you with the awe of weather and as well as fear on how dependent we suddenly were)
The bush was a pleasant backdrop.
Even when I began gathering natural materials, I was still only thinking about how they might change in colour and shape. But, I found myself asking a different question. Not, "What can I make from this?” But, “What kind of relationship am I getting myself into?" That question changed everything.
Now I rarely gather with certainty. Sometimes I return with pockets full of bark and seedpods. Sometimes I return with nothing at all. Neither feels like a wasted walk. Walking away empty-handed has become part of the practice. It reminds me that the purpose of entering a place is not always to take something from it. Sometimes it is just to become more familiar with it. I still remember my first bull ant bite. At the time it was unexpected and very painful. Now I laugh whenever I think about it.
It was a surprisingly effective, if painful, introduction.
Being present in the landscape had explosively reminded me that I wasn't only an observer. I was a participant who needed to observe better. Working with always brings an expectation of exchange: Patience. Respect. Reciprocity. Sometimes even discomfort.
The same has proved true of creativity. If I try too hard to control natural inks, they always remind me that they have their own character: Pigments separate. Cloth responds differently than expected. Marks appear that I never intended. There is a thought that these are something to rethink and re-conceptualise. Now I think of them as the most important elements of all. It was my artistic work with alpaca fibre that introduced me to the idea of partnership and that materials are participating in the creative process. Not with intent but through the very nature of their construction and structure.
I have also discovered that this is true of people. Some of the richest experiences in my artistic life have come through collaboration. Not because we always agreed. But where that disagreement bought a richer layer to the thinking as each person brought a way of seeing that neither of us could have found alone. Working with another person asks much the same as working with natural materials. I am asked to listen. To let go of certainty but also to hold to that thread of truth I felt was valuable. To allow my own ideas to be challenged and sometimes changed.
That is uncomfortable. It can also be wonderfully enlarging.
I no longer think of creativity as something I do alone. Every artwork carries traces of relationships…With place. With weather. With materials. With conversations. With people who have walked beside me. Even with those places and people who unknowingly changed the way I see. The finished work may appear to belong to a single artist. But I know that is never quite true. It is the visible expression of many relationships quietly working together.
Only now have I have realised that "working with" is not simply a method. It is an attitude. It changes how I gather. How I teach. How I collaborate. How I write. Even how I pay attention. It reminds me that I am not standing outside the world looking in. I am already part of it.
And perhaps that has been the greatest surprise of all. The work has never been asking me to become more skilful.
It has been quietly teaching me how to hold the relationship of ‘with’ .